[Esip-preserve] Notes on a Workshop on Data Sharing

[Alice Barkstrom]

Last week, ESA held a conference on Preservation and Value (PV2009)
at the ESA facility in Villafranca, Spain (just outside of Madrid).  Following
that conference, there was a workshop (Friday) on EO data policy 
issues that included
17 presentations.  The web site from which the presentations may be obtained
is http://www.genesi-dr.eu/index.php?menu=event&idEvent=60  This web page
identifies the papers and presenters by their position in the agenda.

There are three important papers at this workshop that I think are relevant to
the ESIP Federation data policy.

First, the European Space Agency (and the European Union) is
pursuing a fairly formal procedure in developing their data sharing policy,
including what appears to be strong coordination with European Union
legislative policy.  A presentation on the structure of this framework is
available in the second paper at the workshop by E. Lopinto from the
Italian Space Agency (ASI).  If you look at the presentation
(http://www.genesi-dr.eu/documents/2_Lopinto_GENESI-DR_DP_2ndWS_ASI_Villafranca.pdf)
you'll see that it has some fairly serious money and is already embedded
in ESA policy documentation.  [GENESI-DR is short for
Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital 
Repositories]
Note also that Lopinto's presentation includes a discussion of licensing
policy, which the ESIP Federation has not discussed.  While not part of
this workshop, the Europeans also have a project on Long-Term Data
Preservation (LTDP) that was discussed in a number of papers at PV2009.

Second, the paper (and the telecon in which A. P. Keith participated 
from Canada)
on "Data Policy experiences from an international perspective" is of 
considerable
interest from the standpoint of the influence of data sharing policy 
on commercial
development.  Briefly, Keith identifies the U.S. Land Remote Sensing 
Act of 1992
and the 2003 U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Policy as having played a
key role in opening the door to commercial remote sensing - albeit 
primarily for
high resolution imagery.  I asked about other kinds of Earth science 
data, including
in situ data.  Keith did not feel that there was a commercial market 
for providing
these data.  Remote sensing data for weather forecasting are already regarded
as a government responsibility.  In situ data (such as the 
temperature and humidity
records from surface networks) and other kinds of process or climate 
data do not
appear to have any commercial viability.

Third, the paper by Leif Orvald 
(http://www.genesi-dr.eu/documents/17_Orvald_Rapideye_EOdatapolicy.pdf)
indicates the difficulty a commercial imagery provider
has in dealing with the "free and open" data sharing 
principles.  Orvald is a representative
from RapidEye, which owns several satellites and is currently 
providing imagery from
them to their clients.  To put his presentation in context, ESA is 
expecting to provide
a set of Earth Observing satellites for monitoring the Earth.  These 
satellites are called
Earth Sentinels and include the GMES satellites as one portion of this system.

These three papers struck me as the most interesting and relevant 
ones for thinking
about ESIP Federation data sharing policy.  I believe the web site 
for accessing
the presentations is openly available, without requiring login or passwords.

Bruce B. 
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