P&S Monthly Oct 15, 2010

Minutes Products and Services Committee Telecon Oct 15

Participants: Yuechen Chi, Carol Meyer, John Scialdone, Rob Raskin

1. GCMD has been very active in the past month in advancing the GCMD-ESIP portal! They are building the capability to automatically tag metadata as being "ESIP" whenever a product or service is registered by a Federation member. They also have updated the portal banner to match the look and feel of the new ESIP Web site. And they are preparing a slide or two for the ESIP 101 Orientation packet, that stress the need for members to register their offerings. It was suggested that we should help spread the word that GCMD is not NASA-only - the breadth of data centers represented is unmatched, and their science keywords have been vetted by a broad, often international community. GCMD is improving its compliance and compatibility with int'l metadata standards. These points should be stressed whenever we promote the use of the portal. It was also suggested that GCMD provide an article for an upcoming Federation newsletter to help encourage more product and service registration.

2. For the Winter Meeting we identified two activities closely related to the Meeting theme of maximizing the value/impact of Earth science information. GCMD will present a 1 hour workshop on using metadata authoring tools and showcasing the ESIP Data and Services Portal. And we will have an open discussion on how we can do a better job of promoting products and services (e.g., collecting in Drupal some marketing material on each ESIP - that can be used to produce customized marketing). These two activities should fill one 3-hour afternoon session. Another activity will be to present Cloud Computing services that might be possible through a Federation Cloud. This would likely be a 1.5 hour session co-sponsored by the Info Technology & Interop Committee.

3. Yuechen gave an update on the Testbed work to test unique identifier schemes. It is now being populated with dataset identifiers, in close cooperation with the Preservation and Stewardship Cluster and a U. Colorado student. We discussed the pros and cons of placing comments on the wiki (where internal communications typically occur) and on the Drupal-powered web site (where the database of datasets reside). We chose to try to use the Drupal installation, to enable comments to be placed directly with the test facilities. Passwords will be available shortly to enable write-access to Drupal (and for other Federation purposes).

4. The Committee budget request is undergoing another iteration, based upon feedback received for the Finance Committee. Requested were more details and more justification (contributing to metrics, supporting the strategic plan, etc.). More funds will be requested for items #2 (service advertising), #3 (data and service quality measures), and any other "promotional"-type activities, as they are more closely related to the Winter Meeting theme, with less funds to be requested for item #1 (service skills bank), which was less favorably received, despite its capability to deliver solid metrics. Comments on the Budget request should be sent to Rob in the next week (by Fri Oct 22).