[Esip-preserve] Jan 2011 Meeting - brief Debrief

[Curt Tilmes]

Well, I think we had a very good meeting, lots of informative (and
sometimes controversial) discussion.  It was especially nice to pull
in some of the non-regular folks looking for a place to hang out
during the breakouts and bounce some of our ideas off of them as well
as have them inject some fresh view points.


I've linked several presentations from the meeting here:

http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Interagency_Data_Stewardship/LifeCycle/Jan2011Meeting

Anyone else with talks at that meeting, try to get them uploaded and
linked onto that page (or email to me and I'll get them on there.)

I'm still in the process of going through my notes from the meeting,
and will try to get more details organized and on the wiki soon.

The Business Meeting considered our "Interagency Data
Stewardship/Principles"

http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Interagency_Data_Stewardship/Principles

and decided not to accept/adopt them at this time (I wasn't at the
meeting -- will try to get more details about this outcome and we can
discuss how to proceed with them.) [comments from attendees?]


In the breakouts, we had three main areas we discussed:
1. Citation guidelines and identifiers
2. Towards an Earth Science provenance/context content standard
3. Towards an Earth Science provenance/context ontology

High level plans:

1. Citations: In the very short term, try to make concrete citation
recommendations, probably referencing existing work (IPY paper, EOS
paper, etc.) to encourage people to start citing data at all. The
longer we wait, the more papers go in without citations.  As time goes
on citations will get better, more precise, include DOIs, URIs, etc.
Keep working on more specific recommendations and rationales for
better citations.

Encourage archives/distributers to include specific citation
guidelines with data (many do this already).


2. Content Standard: We converged around developing a sort of
"spreadsheet" that will capture a variety of fields related to all the
artifacts of Earth Science Provenance/Context Content.  Rama
volunteered to be the "book boss" editor of this and organize it.  In
the coming months, we'll try to 'fill in the blanks'.  He will start
with the Hunolt paper and John Moses lessons learned from their ESDIS
work.

Some strawman fields of interest:
Category - try to organize the fields into categories/hierarchy
Content name - What artifact should we preserve?
Definition/Description
Level of detail
priority
where this artifact comes from
what phase of the project should it get captured?
rationale for item
user community class that can use this artifact?
representation in metadata (ISO 19115*, SensorML?)
Ontology representation
Purpose (Understanding? Auditting? Needed for reproducibility?)

>From this raw material, we can publish various subsets in different
forms as it matures.

We would like to aim to get this moved through one or more standards
bodies as well (NASA ESDSWG SPG, IEEE, ISO, etc.)

More on this later.


3. Ontology: Very 'researchy' at this point, but several funded
activities are already working on this, so we can't ignore it.  We
hope to use this cluster as a focus for the various groups working on
it to find common ground.  We'll use the content spreadsheet above to
try to organize specific ontology/vocabulary terms for the items in
the content standard.  This will help us converge on commonalities.

I urge anyone interested in Semantic Web who missed the tutorial
to take a look at the talks here as well:
http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Semantic_Web_Tutorials


We also had a brief business meeting and elected a new Chair -- Me.
Thanks everyone, and especially Ruth for creating this cluster and
getting everything off the ground.  Ruth and I talked a bit about
coming work in the next year, and we will continue to work together
closely, both within this cluster and overlapping heavily with the
NASA ESDSWG.


And, of course, now we have to start thinking about the content of the
Summer Meeting and specific goals we would like to accomplish prior to
that meeting:

http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Summer_2011_Meeting

So, we have a lot of work to do.

That said, I'm still a bit overwhelmed with trying to recover and
digest the meeting from last week and have a lot on my plate this
week.

I'd like to propose we skip the planned meeting for this week (we'll
continue mailing list and wiki activities in the mean time) and work
towards planning the agenda for the February 9 meeting.

Curt