[Esip-preserve] ESIP at the GEO Science and Technology Committee

[Mark A. Parsons]

Hi,

Because of our work on data citation and peer-review, the GEO Science and Technology Committee (STC) invited ESIP to participate in their committee meeting and subsequent meeting of a task team. The task team is working on GEO data citation guidelines and the concept of a "GEO Label" that certifies some level of data quality. Upon request from Carol Meyer, I served as the ESIP representative.

GEO is governed by an Executive Committee representing the ministers and four large working committees: Science and Technology, Data and Architecture, User Interface, and Capacity Building. The role of the STC is to engage the science and technology communities in GEOSS. This was their 15th meeting. The agenda and background materials for the meeting are at http://www.earthobservations.org/meetings/meetings.html

The STC is responsible for two high level tasks:
	ST-09-01: Catalyzing Research and Development (R&D) Resources for GEOSS led by Kath Fontaine at NASA
	ST-09-02: Promoting Awareness and Benefits of GEO in the Science and Technology Community led by Hans Peter Plag at the University of Nevada, Reno

You can find out more about the activities under the tasks at http://www.geo-tasks.org/. Data citation and the GEO Label are part of task 2.

I gave a brief summary at the general meeting and presented to the task team on data citation and identifiers and made four suggestions that I think are in keeping with the emerging ESIP position:

  1. Use IPY Data Citation Guidelines for now, especially for existing works.
  2. Apply DOIs (or ARKs  or PURLs) to collections, consider versioning and data stability.
  3. Have systems create, attach, and maintain UUIDs with files.
  4. Lobby publishers to require data citation.

There was general concurrence that the IPY Guidelines were a good place to start. They will review them further and then take them to the full committee and Executive. They were not interested in exploring the details of identifiers, but noted that GEOSS Common Infrastructure team is exploring this issue (I bet they need to read the paper we struggle to write).

The second topic, the GEO Label, was much broader ranging. There wasn't a clear consensus on what was meant by certifying "quality" or by whom. Much of the discussion was similar to our town hall discussion around peer review. Finally, after the meeting had formally concluded there was some emerging consensus that a Geo Label would be more like an audit certification. In other words it would certify that there was some level of data verification, that documentation was complete to some degree, etc. It would not certify quality per se, but simply that the data had gone through some minimal level of review and curation. This could be a useful certification if it is developed. I suspect it will take some time.

All told, I believe the committee was interested in our cluster's work and thankful for the participation.

Cheers,

-m.