[Sigsti-l] Draft #2 of 'data discovery' session proposal

[Joe Hourcle]

Thank you, those who sent comments.

I've added a statement on the intended language, heard back from a few of
the presenters, and cleaned up much of the language in the text (I hope).

Hopefully, I haven't encroached too much the proposals that KT and John
are working on.  (If we do, we could try to have this one earlier in the
week, and then point people to the other sessions)

-Joe


--

ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting Session Proposal
October 18-25, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Session Title:  Data Awareness and Discovery in the Space and Earth
                Sciences
Sponsor: SIG-STI


With social computing comes the need to share information with others.
Although the cost of transfering information has greatly decreased with
inexpensive internet connections, there volume of information requires
increased effort in making the information known, and in a useful form.
The earth and space sciences have been dealing with these issues, as they
have a number of datasets that have value to the scientific community,
but they are not suitable for archiving, as they may be further refined
or otherwise updated.

Some institutes have moved from the library concept of 'archive' to "resident
archives", where the data is maintained by the people who have the necessary
knowledge to interpret and use the data.  As the data is no longer collected
in a centralized repository, scientists working in a discipline needed to
keep track of multiple locations to obtain their data, each of which had
different interfaces to their data, making it cumbersome to correlate
data from multiple sources.

Some of the science disciplines are now beginning to recognize the benefits of
a centralized organization of their information.  There are many different
approaches underway to improve the findability of information; some are moving
the data to central locations, so they can perform data mining on it; others
are federating into "Virtual Observatories" (VOs), information systems that
search across heterogeneous data sets in multiple archives; others have
organized portal websites with directories of information sources and
accessors to them.

All of these endeavors attempt to reduce the time that it takes to share,
find, and aquire data, so that scientists can devote their efforts towards
doing science.  The majority of the efforts have been organized by the
scientists, with some programming support, without the help of the
information science fields.  Their efforts have created a wide variety of
solutions, from models to standardize the description of data holdings, to
ontologies to allow machines to determine the appropriate data to answer
questions, to federated search engines, to new protocols for serving and
subsetting data.

The presenters will discuss the solutions that their specific disciplines are
implementing, both technical and social.  The planned format is for the
presenters to talk about their projects for about an hour, and then a
lengthy period for questions and answers to the whole group.

This session will provide a perspective from outside the normal LIS
community, and provide information about key developments in the science
community for information distribution. It may also be of interest to
people working in digital libraries, information architecture, information
seeking and use, or the cataloging of images. The 'virtual' aspects of
many of the solutions may be of interest to others organizing communities
of practice.



Presenters:

	Peter Fox, Chief Computational Scientist, High Altitude
	Observatory, National Center for Atmospheric Research
	<http://web.hao.ucar.edu/~pfox>
	"Semantic data query access and using in a Virtual Observatory"

	Todd King, Technical Support Staff Supervisor/Lead Programmer,
	Institute of Geophyics and Planetary Physics, University of
	California, Los Angeles.
	<http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/people/tking.html>
	(waiting for title; SPASE & VMO)

	Raymond J. Walker, Professor in Residence, Institute and
	Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) and Department of Earth
	and Space Science; Research Geophysicist, IGPP, University of
	California, Los Angeles; Manager of the Planetary Plasma
	Interactions Node, NASA Planetary Data System
	<http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/people/rwalker.html>
	(waiting for title; PDS)

	D. Aaron Roberts, Heliospheric Data Environment Program Scientist,
	National Aeronautics and Space Administration
	<http://www-lep.gsfc.nasa.gov/stereo/DAR_Web_Page.html>
	(VSPO; LWSDE)

Peter Fox, Todd King and Raymond Walker are confirmed; Aaron Roberts has given
a verbal committment for either himself or someone from his staff to present.

Should any of these committments fall through, Alisdair Davey of SwRI, Janet
Kozyra of U. Michigan and Walter Snyder of Boise State have expressed
interest.  Peter Cornillon has been contacted, but I have not yet received a
response.  Rahul Ramachandran was suggested by Peter Fox as a backup, but has
not been contacted yet.


Prospective Alternatives:

	Peter Cornillon, Professor of Oceanography, Graduate School of
	Oceanography, University of Rhode Island
	<http://www.gso.uri.edu/faculty_staff/Cornillon_Peter_C.dir/>
	(OPeNDAP)

	Alisdair Davey, Department of Space Studies, Southwest Research
	Institute
	<http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~ard/>
	(Virtual Solar Observatory; Event Catalogs)

	Janet Kozyra, George Carignan Collegiate Research Professor,
	Department of Atmospheric Oceanic and Space Sciences, University
	of Michigan
	<http://aoss.engin.umich.edu/go/?id1=10&id2=1&id3=23>
	(Virtual Conference; VITMO)

	Rahul Ramachandran, Research Scientist, at the Information
	Technology and Systems Center, University of Alabama in
	Huntsville.
	<http://maya.itsc.uah.edu/>
	(ontology use in science data discovery)

	Walter Snyder, Professor, Department of Geosciences; Executive
	Director, Environmental Science & Public Policy Research
	Institute, Boise State University
	<http://earth.boisestate.edu/content/people/faculty/wsnyder.html>
	(Open Archive)


Organizer:
	Joe Hourcle, Software Engineer, Solar Data Analysis Center,
	NASA/Goddard, Greenbelt, MD (SIG STI)
	Phone: (703) 371-9828; Email: oneiros at annoying.org