1. GeoData 2011 Data Life Cycle: Breakout Session #4 (Pine) Breakout Moderator: Joanne Luciano Tetherless World Constellation Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

2. Contributors Chris Mattmann, JPL + USC – Scribe extraordinaire Steve Aulenbach, NEON – assisted in current domain practice facilitation Rob Raskin, JPL Ted Haberman, NOAA Ruth Duerr, NSIDC – Scribe and assisted in recap Cathy Constable, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSID Bob Simons, NOAA Roland Viger, USGS Kavitha Chandrasekar, Indiana University Tom Narock, GSFC Unnamed Guy, Raytheon Erin Robinson, ESIP – Assisted in recap Chris Crosby, SDSC Lee Allison, Arizona Geological Survey Anna Milan, NGDC Robert Arko, LDEO Leonard Johnson, NSF Peter Fox (ubiquitous)

3. Breakout Question What opportunities or means are there for academic and agency collaboration in geoinformatics and GeoData informatics data life cycle citation and ingestion? How can they be optimally leverage and implemented to serve the needs of all constituents?

4. Overview What we’re doing today Opportunities for Collaboration Interesting things to ponder

5. Doing Today What are the things that do exist for the bringing academics and community together? NOAA found that THREDDS catalogs helps them work together with the community. A THREDDS catalog is a way to describe an inventory of available datasets. They provide –a simple hierarchical structure for organizing a collection of datasets –an access method for each dataset –a human understandable name for each dataset –a structure on which further descriptive information can be placed.

6. Opportunities for Collaboration Join groups where you can collaborate… Participate in standards –Geospatial Consortium –ISO committee TC211 Participate in Communities of Practice –ESIP - Earth Science Information Partners –Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Participate open source software development

7. Opportunities for Collaboration Develop best practices –Open source licenses appropriate for your agency –Waving your data rights to make them open and free –Discovery tools Agencies funding to seed the creation of communities of practice –ESIP –USGS

8. Opportunities for Collaboration & Competition Evaluation –Define evaluation criteria for each phase of the data life cycle –Reusability of domain ontologies (and parts of ontologies) Grand Challenges –Cross disciplinary metadata for reuse by other disciplines –Cross disciplinary discovery –Evaluation criteria methods and metrics

9. Curriculum Development Researchers so they know how to –Write a data management plan –Work with data managers –Manage their own data for consumption by others Informaticists and data managers –develop career path for this Software engineers –they need to understand data science General public and primary/secondary education –data usage towards citizen science, engaging public –funding agencies (see below)

10. Specific Response to NSF request for input Requests for funding –NSF criteria not currently conducive to building any sort of infrastructure long term –Fund collaboration activities on a regular basis Volunteer organizations are effective when people can contribute and it is part of their day job –Fund ongoing educational best practices within communities Should there be a requirement for both domain scientists and computer scientists on proposals –

11. Things to Ponder To find things to collaborate on –come up with a list of common needs Common software Research agenda standards development People are retiring How would one accomplish data documentation? –What can the agencies do with the data documentation (at a lower level)?

12. Things to Ponder Do we need to write more formal data management policies? –Develop minimum information standards for the data being captured? How do we go about doing that?

13. Things to Ponder What are the basic technologies, and basic interoperability standards, data formats, etc.? –how can academics get involved in this? –is there a clearing house or some federal agency for taking care of this? The ESIP discovery cluster is working on exactly that problem.