Abstract
Formal international standards as well as promotion of community or
recommended practices have their place in ensuring “FAIRness” of data.
Data management in NASA’s Earth Observation System Data and Information
System (EOSDIS) has benefited from both of these avenues to a
significant extent. The purpose of this paper is to present one example
of each of these, which promote (re)usability. The first is an ISO
standard for specifying preservation content from Earth observation
missions. The work on this started in 2011, informally within the Earth
Science Information Partners (ESIP) in the US, while the European Space
Agency (ESA) was leading an effort on Long-Term Data Preservation
(LTDP). Resulting from the ESIP discussions was NASA’s Preservation
Content Specification, which was applied in 2012 as a requirement for
NASA’s new missions. ESA’s Preserved Data Set Content (PDSC) document
was codified into a document adopted by the Committee on Earth
Observation Satellites (CEOS). It was recognized that it would be useful
to combine PCS and PDSC into an ISO standard to ensure consistency in
data preservation on a broader international scale. This standard,
numbered ISO 19165-2 has been under development since mid-2017. The
second is an example of developing recommendations for “best
practices” within more limited (still fairly broad) communities. A Data
Product Developers’ Guide (DPDG) is currently being developed by one of
NASA’s Earth Science Data System Working Groups (ESDSWGs). It is for use
by developers of products to be derived from Earth observation data to
improve product (re)usability. One of the challenges in developing the
guide is the fact that there are already many applicable standards and
guides. The relevant information needs to be selected and expressed in a
succinct manner, with appropriate pointers to references. The DPDG aims
to compile the most applicable parts of earlier guides into a single
document outlining the typical development process for Earth Science
data products. Standards and best practices formally endorsed by the
Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) Standards Office
(ESO), outputs from ESDSWGs (e.g., Dataset Interoperability Working
Group, and Data Quality Working Group), and recommendations from
Distributed Active Archive Centers and data producers are emphasized.