Winter Meeting 2011 - Session Abstracts

CECWG

The ESIP Education committee is forming a Climate Change Education Working Group (CCEWG) to support member’s climate education initiatives. The Working Group will commence with a 90 minute panel-led town hall meeting featuring experts from several ESIP member organizations, including but not limited to NASA, NOAA, GLOBE, EPA, NSF, CLN and GLOBE. This will be followed by a group discussion to establish common ground. After the break we'll reconvene to set a course of action for 2011.

• Needs Telecon/Projector

ESIP 101

The ESIP Federation has grown its membership during the past several years and has evolved its activities during the same time. For those new to the ESIP Federation or anyone interested in learning more about its activities, join us for an overview presentation that will highlight the history, current activities, opportunities for involvement and how to become a partner. Session leader: Carol Meyer, Jim Frew

Air Quality

The Air Quality Workgroup breakout session will provide brief updates from multiple air quality related projects along with three in-depth discussions. The brief project updates from efforts across the community will focus on advances in interoperability as well as any work in evaluating and maximizing the impact of data in research and decision support. Three in-depth discussion topics are planned:

• Air Quality Cyberinfrastructure Recommendations Review - from the EPA CyAir project
• GEOSS Mid-Term Evaluation and Review
• GEOSS Air Quality Community of Practice Planning

Doc Consortium

Everyone knows that keeping up with changes in technology is difficult, particularly when a new technology makes current capabilities obsolete. Systems that have developed and evolved over the years are stressed by new demands and drivers. People with proven expertise resist adoption of new approaches. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that the way ahead is generally hazy. Uncertainty about the best approach can lead to costly dead-ends and even successful projects run the risk of eventual failure because of unforeseen twists in the adoption process.

This period of high uncertainty and risk is termed the “Era of Ferment”. It is a particularly bad time for interoperability, as groups go their own way in attempts to define “the way”. Pressure to meet deadlines makes custom solutions attractive and, in the end, even small initial differences develop into chasms that make sharing data and results expensive and time consuming.

We are on the threshold of an Era of Ferment initiated by the emergence and adoption of new ISO standards for documenting observations, products, and services. These standards significantly extend the breadth of previous standards and make it possible to address pressing challenges in transparency, understanding and preservation. Recognition of these benefits has driven many organizations to adopt these standards, but they now face the uncertainties and risks associated with the transition.

It is clearly important to escape this Era of Ferment as soon as possible. This session initiates progress towards that goal with ESIP members who understand that identifying common approaches and conventions is critical. We need to minimize risk and uncertainty and grow a community of practice aimed at creating and sharing high-quality data, products and services that are documented for understanding across disciplinary and national boundaries now and in the future. ESIP is clearly a great place to start!

Data Preservation

Citation Guidelines and Identifiers

Citation and reproducibility are key concepts underpinning the science enterprise. Given that data have become central to the scientific process in many fields, the ability to cite data in a uniform manner is becoming increasingly important. For these reasons, the Stewardship and Preservation cluster of the ESIP federation has agreed to work on citation recommendations for both data providers and data users over the upcoming year. One of the core issues for citation is data identification, a topic that the cluster has addressed through its identifier assessment and testbed activities. In this session, the status of current data citation practice is reviewed, an update of cluster activities will be given, and a work plan for moving forward over the next year in these areas will be developed.

Towards an Earth Science Provenance and Context content standard sessions

During the first session in this two part track, existing guidance on what information needs to be kept in order to ensure usability and trustability of Earth Science data will be described and discussed. John Moses of NASA will also describe the reality as compared to this guidance as it applies to several NASA missions. Given this background, the remainder of these sessions will be dedicated to developing an action plan for the Preservation and Stewardship cluster to move forward with the development of a content standard for Earth Science provenance and context.

Towards an Earth Science Provenance and Context ontology sessions

During the first session in this two part track, an overview of the leading provenance ontologies will be given, the gaps in these ontologies for Earth Sciences reviewed, and a number of pre-existing use cases discussed. Over the course of the session, additional use cases will be developed and a plan or roadmap for developing an Earth Science specific Provenance/Context Ontology within the cluster will be developed.

Cluster business meeting

The cluster will hold its annual officer election and flesh out its work plan for the next year based on the results of the previous sessions and a discussion of the existing testbed activities.

MENDS

NASA ESDIS has formed a team of data systems and metadata experts to analyze requirements and recommend the best approach for NASA Earth Science data systems to align with the international metadata standard ISO 19115. The team considered the applicability, limitations, and possible profiles of this standard for the diverse data sets maintained by NASA data centers and missions. The team’s initial findings and recommendations regarding to how reach the interoperability goals of NASA using these standards will be discussed. We are also pleased to have David Danko, lead of the Project Team revising the ISO 19115 standard, attending the session. He will describe the current status of the revision process and discuss applications of ISO 19115 to data quality and lineage metadata.