Interagency Data Stewardship/LifeCycle/Preservation Forum/TeleconNotes/20090311
March 11, 2009 - Telecon Notes
Attending
Rob Raskin , Bob Downs (CIESIN), John Scialdone (CIESIN), Curt Tilmes (GFSC), Mike Folk(THG), Bruce Barkstrom (NASA/NOAA retired), Mark Parsons (NSIDC), H. K. Ramapriyan (NASA), Ken Casey (NODC)
Agenda
- Finalize list of sessions
- Define concrete goals and outcomes of all sessions
- Define desired session content
- Identify speakers for each session
- Determine what each speaker should be requested to present
Discussion
Ruth started the meeting off by noting that the theme of the upcoming summer ESIP Federation meeting is Stewardship and that as a consequence, in her opinion, if we determine that additional time or sessions on the topic are needed we should propose them.
Rama provided an update on the NASA attendance issue. NASA has a problem with attending conferences this year, so many of the target participants may not be able to attend in person. He is working with Frank Lindsay on a "conference determination" request that may allow this workshop to be declared a workshop - in which case NASA folks could attend. The factor that the sessions have concrete and actionable goals and a report will result is expected to help in this regard.
At that point attention turned to the primary agenda items. Bruce noted that the big issue seems to be whether it is possible to deal with locally autonomous policies in archives that harvest each others metadata while still being able to trace back to the original data. Mark noted that the issues of provenance, reference, and de-confliction of metadata are core. Ruth noted that these issues of sharing, tracking, and making good use of metadata across agencies seemed to be a "grand challenge" if you will in the preservation arena. This led to a general discussion of provenance and metadata exchange. Rama asked what needs to be done to get to the point where there could be provenance standards and what agencies could do to support getting there. Curt noted that while other fields (law enforcement, medicine, etc.) seem to be making some progress in defining standards for their field, earth science doesn't really have anything yet.
Bruce noted that he generally thinks about provenance in two contexts:
- Property rights - the right to redistribute, to modify, etc.
- History of production
Curt noted that he generally thinks about three aspects of provenance:
- Property rights
- The issue of trust and reputation
- Understanding
Mark noted that issues of provenance seem to be being confused with issues of context - both of which are called for by the OAIS reference model.
At this point it was generally agreed that an additional full-day (split over two days) session just on provenance and context was needed. The outcome of the session would be a report defining the requirements and guidelines for provenance/context tracking and provenance/context tracking systems in the earth sciences (see our meeting plans for a summary).
In light of this additional major session, the four sessions previously proposed were reviewed and adjusted accordingly. The first session on the Agency perspective was adjusted to limit the invited presenters to LOC, NARA, and NSF. NASA, NOAA, EPA, and USGS have all presented at the previous meeting. We have POC's for NARA and LOC - Ruth agreed to ask Peter Fox for a pointer to an appropriate person from the NSF provenance program. This session should be an early component of the full-day provenance/context session. It was agreed that the session on standards could stand alone and would be useful. Among the goals are the desire to determine where additional work is needed and where interagency collaboration could help. The preservation technologies session also can stand alone. It was suggested that it should be held as a sub-session within the overall technology workshop on the first day. This session would be a series of short talks on the technologies, what aspect of the data life-cycle landscape they cover. All presenters should be asked to make sure they cover how they deal with provenance. In addition to these talks, the technology demonstration sessions can be used if the presenter want to give a live demo. The last session on what other disciplines are doing should also precede the provenance workshop, but after discussion it was generally agreed that presenters should be asked to cover the broad preservation/stewardship topic.
