HR: 1330h
AN: SH42A-0502 [PDF]
TI: Evolving the Living With a Star Data System Definition
AU: * Otranto, J F
EM: jotranto@pop400.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: QSS Group, Inc., 7404 Executive Place
Suite 400, Lanham, MD 20706 United States
AU: DiJoseph, M
EM: Mary.S.Dijoseph@nasa.gov
AF: Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 462, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB:
NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) Program is a space weather-focused and applications-driven research program. The LWS Program
is soliciting input from the solar, space physics, space weather, and climate science communities to develop a system that
enables access to science data associated with these disciplines, and advances the development of discipline and
interdisciplinary findings.
The LWS Program will implement a data system that builds upon the existing and planned data capture, processing, and storage
components put in place by individual spacecraft missions and also inter-project data management systems, including active
and deep archives, and multi-mission data repositories. It is technically feasible for the LWS Program to integrate data
from a broad set of resources, assuming they are either publicly accessible or allow access by permission.
The LWS Program data system will work in coordination with spacecraft mission data systems and science data repositories,
integrating their holdings using a common metadata representation. This common representation relies on a robust metadata
definition that provides journalistic and technical data descriptions, plus linkages to supporting data products and tools.
The LWS Program intends to become an enabling resource to PIs, interdisciplinary scientists, researchers, and students
facilitating both access to a broad collection of science data, as well as the necessary supporting components to understand
and make productive use of these data.
For the LWS Program to represent science data that are physically distributed across various ground system elements,
information will be collected about these distributed data products through a series of LWS Program-created agents. These
agents will be customized to interface or interact with each one of these data systems, collect information, and forward any
new metadata records to a LWS Program-developed metadata library. A populated LWS metadata library will function as a single
point-of-contact that serves the entire science community as a first stop for data availability, whether or not science data
are physically stored in an LWS-operated repository. Further, this metadata library will provide the user access to
information for understanding these data including descriptions of the associated spacecraft and instrument, data format,
calibration and operations issues, links to ancillary and correlative data products, links to processing tools and models
associated with these data, and any corresponding findings produced using these data.
The LWS may also support an active archive for solar, space physics, space weather, and climate data when these data would
otherwise be discarded or archived off-line. This archive could potentially serve also as a data storage backup facility for
LWS missions.
The plan for the LWS Program metadata library is developed based upon input received from the solar and geospace science
communities; the library's architecture is based on existing systems developed for serving science metadata. The LWS Program
continues to seek constructive input from the science community, examples of both successes and failures in dealing with
science data systems, and insights regarding the obstacles between the current state-of-the-practice and this vision for the
LWS Program metadata library.
DE: 2199 General or miscellaneous
DE: 2799 General or miscellaneous
DE: 7599 General or miscellaneous
DE: 7899 General or miscellaneous
SC: SPA - Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting