[Esip-preserve] Suggestion on Response to GEO

[Alice Barkstrom]

The attachment is a quick and fairly short response to the six 
questions GEO asked about.
If you're working on a Windows machine, it will probably look best in 
Wordpad, since that's
what I used to create it.  Those of you who prefer Macs are left to 
your own devices.

I don't know that this is necessarily the final response, it's just a 
quick attempt to get
something together so ESIP can have Carol Meyers respond back by mid-October.

Bruce B.
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Response to Communique' from the Data Sharing Task Force to GEO Committees

Key Questions:

1.  Guidelines and procedures for GEOSS data, metadata, and value-added products and services

The ESIP Federation's cluster on Data Stewardship and Provenance is currently working on identifying
practical and permanent data identifiers that may be used for citations and archive management.
This work will involve a metadata testbed that may illustrate how these identifiers will interact with
semantic web technologies that may be of broader interest to the GEO.

2.  Need for guidelines and procedures to realize desirable societal benefits

It is clear that tools and guidelines or procedures that assist users in working with these tools are 
beneficial to achieving societal benefits from GEOSS data.  Because of the cultural divergences
between the contributing parties of GEO, substantial effort is required to develop optimal and useful
tools, guidelines, and procedures.  The ESIP Federation's work with a metadata testbed, as well as
related research work involving metadata standards comparisons, are potentially useful in providing
comparisons on a level playing field.

3.  Usefulness of draft Implementation Guidelines

The draft Implementation Guidelines appear to be a useful statement of principles for further development.

4.  Specific issues to be addressed

One of the major challenges in developing data sharing policies lies in the fact that there are four,
slightly inconsistent metadata standards that are required in order to catalog data so users can find
and use it:
	The OAIS Reference Model
	The NASA ECS/ECHO metadata model
	The ISO 19115-2 and FGDC geospatial data metadata standards
	The METS/PREMIS/Dublin Core library standards
The ESIP Federation can assist GEO in exploring practical methods of "harmonizing" these families.

5.  Existing or planned activities to assist technical implementation of data sharing

The ESIP Federation's metadata testbed work, which will examine how metadata interacts with data
users to assist in accessing and using Earth science data.

6.  Key dataset types

There are a number of dataset types that need to be included in tests of metadata standards:
	- Highly regular satellite datasets that include both imagery and non-image data types,
		such as temperature profiles, chemical constituent concentration profiles, and
		lidar or microwave data, in which instantaneous data products are not images,
		as well as time and space averaged versions of such data, which may or may
		not be produced in gridded form
	- Long term in situ data sets, such as those produced by surface networks, buoy and
		tidal guage networks, and radiosonde temperature profiles
	- Biodiversity samples
	- Field experiment data, with multiple instruments observing over a fixed geographic
		area for a specified time interval
	- Aircraft and ship data, in which the data are obtained along the trajectory of the flight
		or ship track
The ESIP Federation's metadata testbed intends to include these kinds of data in their trials
of different metadata standards.