NOAA Sessions on NIDIS, CLASS, the Data Centers, and much much more!

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

NOAA is hosting a series of breakout sessions at the Summer ESIP Meeting and we hope you will participate. In all of these sessions, we hope to inform you of some things going on within NOAA, and more importantly, be informed BY you. Your input, feedback, and advice is critical to us! Please join in the discussions. Our initial list of topics is provided below, and of course we welcome your ideas as well... this is a wiki after all, so please feel free to add your ideas here as well.


Overall Organizer: Ken Casey (Kenneth.Casey@noaa.gov)


National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)

  • "how do we organize a larger activity based upon what we learn from smaller activities".
  • Discussion led by Mike Brewer (Michael.J.Brewer@noaa.gov)


The NEW Comprehensive Large Array Data Stewardship System (CLASS) - NOAA Data Center Paradigm

  • "how the Open Archival Information System Reference Model is leading us into the light".
  • Discussion led by Ken Casey (Kenneth.Casey@noaa.gov)

File:OAIS Overview 22Apr2008.ppt OAIS FunctionalEntities.jpg OAIS RM Fig6-4 SharedStorage.jpg

The CLASS Application Programming Interface - SNAAP!

  • "could it really be that easy?".
  • Discussion led by Ken Casey (Kenneth.Casey@noaa.gov)

Eric Kihn, the lead developer for SNAAP, could not be at the meeting but in his absence we attempted to have a meaningful conversation based on the presentation he provided below.

File:SNAAP ESIP08.ppt

About 21 people from across the Federation participated. It was clear almost immediately that the questions being raised were beyond the other NOAA personnel present. It was also clear that there was a lot of technical interest in the approaches being pursued in this prototype to deliver machine-to-machine access to NOAA's archive holdings, both those physically residing in the CLASS IT infrastructure as well as in other NOAA Data Center IT systems.

The group identified the topic of how NOAA should provide API access to its archive data holdings as a key item to take up at the January meeting, with a technical focus on the SNAAP prototype.

The Evolution of Data Management at NOAA

  • "We are data management - how NOAA is living up to this quote form the NOAA Administrator at a previous ESIP meeting".
  • Discussion led by Ken McDonald (Kenneth.Mcdonald@noaa.gov)


Metadata - One size does fit all!!

  • Discussion led Ted Habermann (Ted.Habermann@noaa.gov)

This discussion requires that you suspend your disbelief and imagine for a bit that the title is true. Imagine that there is a metadata standard that can be used successfully for many data types served, preserved, and used by NOAA and our ESIP partners. I will use the current ISO 19115 and 19115-2 standards as a straw-person for that imaginary "universal" metadata standard.

ISO Features

As a starting point we can consider this list of features provided by these ISO Standards. Please use these pages to describe datasets or situations which present these needs. If you are currently addressing these needs with metadata, please describe how.