Rama Statement

Back to 2017 Nominations and Ballot

Hampapuram K. Ramapriyan (Rama) Nominee for the position of Chair, Data Stewardship Committee

I am honored to have been nominated by the Nominations Committee to the position of Chair of the Data Stewardship Committee (DSC). I have been a member of the ESIP Federation since its inception, and have actively participated and watched the activities related to data preservation and stewardship grow from a cluster to a committee. I have also been a Board Member of the Foundation for Earth Science. Most recently, I was elected to be the Vice-Chair of the DSC.

The DSC has been a very active group promoting collaborations in several areas and has an excellent record of publications representing the ESIP Federation. There are several tasks/projects of the committee currently underway - Data Management Training; Data Stewardship Maturity Matrix; Provenance and Context Content Standard; Data stewardship for physical samples; Data Citation and Management Policies/Recommendations; Information Quality Cluster; and Engagement and liaison by DSC members with various external organizations such as RDA, CODATA, ICSU/WDS, and COPDESS that share our interest in data stewardship and preservation. Each of these activities is led by highly competent, interested and diligent members of the DSC. This makes the role of the Chair of the DSC relatively easy.

As the Chair, I would facilitate communications among members, encourage participation, provide external liaisons, and take a deeper, more active role in one or more tasks along with other members.

By way of additional background, my years of experience with NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Project, with my recent focus on data stewardship and preservation have prepared me well to take on the role of Chair of DSC. While a civil servant on the ESDIS Project I was the coordinating point of contact for the Data Stewardship Interest Area (DSIA) of the Earth Science Data System Working Groups (ESDSWG). The DSIA consisted of several working groups related to topics such as preservation practices, identifiers and citations, dataset interoperability, and provenance for Earth sciences. I was also responsible for bringing the results of the ESIP Provenance and Context Standard into the NASA environment as a Preservation Content Specification, which is currently being used as a requirement for new missions. As a contractor supporting the ESDIS Project, I continue my focus on data stewardship and preservation and continue to be active in the DSIA, and co-chair the Data Quality Working Group.