Scheffe: Breakout Sessions: Objectives & Questions

Explanation of breakout sessions:

The workshop objective is data system interoperability focused on the air quality community. The 4 leading applications of the first day might give the impression that this is another technical discussion of data needs and a menu of insights and ideas. These are only business case examples to 1) flesh out the data (availability, movement, access, usage) issues and eventually help convey (market?) a future proposal. Marketing an IT strategy is both a bit abstract and likely will fall on deaf ears. So, the cases – model evaluation, trends, health, forecasting – are designed to produce enough variety of needs that should funnel into a more robust solution. There are many other venues to more completely address any one of the business case examples from a science and programmatic perspective – this venue is to address those cases from a data movement perspective. Accordingly, we will not be debating in depth what data is needed; but rather come in with some basic assumptions of what data exists and how best to organize, access, integrate, and so forth. [in the big picture, the business case examples are the end and the IT support is the means..….in this workshop we reverse…with obvious risk of escalating confusion]

1) After hearing brief overviews of data systems and processing centers, the application area breakouts (health, forecasting, model evaluation, characterization) define their needs and ideals in accessing data, using the processing centers, preparing data/information for its users and what the present challenges are in working with data systems and processing centers in achieving their application area objectives.

2) After re-aligning into information system breakouts on day 2 (data systems, processing centers, user visualization/analysis), the groups determine current gaps in meeting the ideals defined by the application area breakouts and how interoperability and shared tools/methods can address those gaps.

Groups A2, B2, and C2 target the IT and organizational issues in relating and connecting the data systems, processing centers, and users. A2 focuses on making the data systems accessible and part of an interoperable AQ network B2 focuses on integrating the data from the data systems and interoperability among the processing centers C2 focuses on making the output from the data systems and processing centers relevant to user visualization and analysis