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http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/scientific-program/abstract-submission-policies/

I have added session IN-026, Near Real Time Data for Earth Science and Space Weather Applications to our list of  Earth and Space Science Informatics Sessions

I have added a page to the wiki to draw your attention to some of the  sessions to be held at this year's Fall American Geophysical Union meeting on 9-13 December 2013 in San Francisco, California. Please feel free to add sessions being presented by ESDSWG members or that you think will be of interest to the ESDSWG community.

2013 Fall AGU Sessions

The deadline for abstracts is August 6, 2013.

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the 2013 ESDSWG meeting to be held Wednesday 2nd through Friday 4th October at Goddard Space Flight Center.

This is an important technical interchange meeting for all ESDSWG members. As last year, members of the current working groups will be asked to present their findings and recommendations for review by ESDIS and members of the ESDSWG community. The current working groups should plan to have their deliverables largely complete  prior to the meeting. Later this month, we will start inviting proposals for new working groups and follow-on activities for some of the existing working groups. During the meeting, we will hold a series of breakout sessions to review the proposals and plan working group activities for 2014.

The annual meeting is an important part of the ESDSWG planning and decision-making process and we encourage all ESDSWG members to attend. Unfortunately, due to the highly interactive nature of the technical review and planning sessions, we do not anticipate being able to offer a remote participation option for the meeting. Further information about the meeting, including a draft agenda, will be posted to the Earthdata Wiki as is becomes available

In order to comply with NASA policy regarding the conduct of meetings and due to our use of on-site facilities at GSFC, attendance at this meeting will be restricted to verified members of the NASA Earth science community. The meeting is open to NASA employees and contractors; representatives of NASA-funded facilities; representatives of ACCESS and MEaSUREs-funded projects; and representatives of other organizations receiving NASA funding related to Earth science data. This meeting is not open to the general public. If in doubt, please contact Steve Olding to verify eligibility.

As part of the registration process, we will also need to organize access to the GSFC campus. If you have a NASA-issued PIV card then you already have access to GSFC. For US citizens and legal permanent residents, we just need to capture your legal name and email address during meeting registration. It is important that you enter your first name and last name as shown on the ID that you will be using at the security gate (e.g. driver’s license). You can enter the name that you are commonly known by in the “Name as it would appear on the badge” field.  Access for foreign nationals will require a bit more work - we will contact you following registration with further details.

http://www.regonline.com/esdswg2013

The 2013 ESDSWG meeting is confirmed for October 2nd-4th at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The majority of the proceedings will take place in and around the Building 8 auditorium.

For NASA folks organizing travel, this is an on-site meeting and, as such, will not appear in the NASA Conference Tracking System (NCTS).

More details to follow on the 2013 ESDSWG Meeting pages.

Karen Moe, NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), and George Percivall, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), have invited ESDSWG to join them for a Webinar on May 31

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/916126983

Agenda - draft

• Introduction
• OGC Standards Activities Relevant to the NASA community - George Percivall
• Getting the most of the OGC IP Programs - Nadine Alameh, Raj Singh
• Successful NASA-OGC Collaboration in GEOSS
• Q&A

The webinar broadcast will originate from GSFC Bldg 32, room S241.  Come join the group there or signup for the online webinar.
Title:    Update on OGC results for NASA
Date:    Friday, May 31, 2013
Time:    1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements

PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server

Mac®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.6 or newer

Mobile attendees
Required: iPhone®, iPad®, Android™ phone or Android tablet

We are planning to hold the 2013 Earth Science Data System Working Group Meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Wednesday 2nd – Friday 4th October.

This is an important technical interchange meeting for all ESDSWG members. As last year, members of the current working groups will be asked to present their findings and recommendations for review by ESDIS and members of the ESDSWG community. We will also hold a series of breakout sessions to review proposals for new working groups and plan working group activities for 2014. The annual meeting is an important part of the ESDSWG planning and decision-making process and we encourage all ESDSWG members to attend. Unfortunately, due to the highly interactive nature of the technical review and planning sessions, we do not anticipate being able to offer a remote participation option for the meeting.

A few details have yet to be confirmed so you may want to hold off on booking flights until we have final confirmation but I hope that we are going to be able to stick to the date and venue above. I will let you know about registration and hotel booking options as soon as we have the details available. As part of the registration process, we will also need to organize security badges for non-NASA staff. More details to follow.

The 2013 ESDSWG Meeting is provisionally scheduled for October 2 - 4 at the Goddard Space Flight Center. More details to follow.

As most of you may know, NASA is a member of the OGC and has an opportunity to submit a vote on the GeoServices Rest API. There has been some controversy about whether this spec, addressing a REST implementation of several existing OGC standards including WMS, WFS and WCS among others, would be helpful or introduce confusion.

The TC representative, Don Sullivan/NASA ARC and Karen Moe (as PC rep) welcome your comments.

The voting is open at least until the middle of June. Please provide your comments by 6/07/13.

More details st OGC GeoServices REST API

Most of our working groups are now up and running and have started work on the activities defined in their action plans. Thanks to all of the technical chairs for their hard work in getting the groups started and getting their wiki pages set up in the Earthdata Collaboration Environment (ECE). If you have not yet joined one of the working groups, please to contact the relevant technical chair directly (contact details in the ECE) to let them know of your interest or let me know if you have any problem contacting the right person.

Standards Interest Area

The Standards Interest Area groups (Datacasting, Preservation Content, OpenSearch, GeoTIFF, and KML standard RFCs) are a little different to the other working groups. These groups are drafting or reviewing Requests for Comment (RFCs) for the relevant standards. David Cuddy and Saurabh Channan are currently working on the KML and GeoTIFF RFCs. When these RFCs get to an appropriate state, we will be inviting members of ESDSWG to provide additional input before submitting the RFCs for review. When the RFCs are ready to be formally submitted to the standards review process, ESDSWG will be working with the ESDIS Standards Office to identify members of the technical working group (TWG) for the review.

Earthdata Collaboration Environment (ECE)

The ECE is be the center of our communications strategy for the working groups. I am encouraging all of the working groups to make use of the ECE to post activity plans, draft/final documents, and regular updates on their activities (however brief) to the ECE. If you want to find out about one of the working groups then the ECE is the first place to go. If your working group is making use of external collaboration resources (e.g. Google Docs) as part of your activities then please post a link to the relevant item in the ECE so that ESDSWG members can find it.

I encourage the technical chairs to post their working groups events (e.g. telecons) to the ESDSWG calendar on the ECE so that everyone has visibility of what is going on and we can avoid scheduling conflicts. You can subscribe to the calendar (read only) from Outlook, Google Calendar, Thunderbird etc. using iCal links – details at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/TEAMCAL/Subscribing+to+Team+Calendars

Members of the ESDSWG groups have edit permissions to all of the ESDSWG pages. Feel free to use the commenting, liking, survey, etc. capabilities of Confluence are part of your working group activities. Ross and Minnie can help advise us if there is something that you want to do in the ECE but are not sure how.

Be aware that, by default, all ESDSWG pages are visible to other ECE uses. This will eventually include a number of non-NASA users with URS profiles. Please be careful about posting information that you may not want to be public (e.g. telecon numbers and passcodes or personal phone numbers) to unrestricted pages. If necessary, you can change the restrictions on individual pages so that they are only visible to members of the ESDSWG group. Let me know if you need help with this.

If you don’t yet have an ECE account then please contact me and I can help you get set up.

ACCESS and MEaSUREs Projects

Many of you are contributing to ESDSWG as part of your ACCESS or MEaSUREs project commitments. Please let me know if you are contributing to one of the working groups as part of your ACCESS/MEaSUREs commitment so that I can make sure that your project gets appropriate credit for your participation.

Please let me know if you need any help getting set up with the working groups or if you have any suggestions for how we can improve the operation of the working groups.

Thanks.

--Steve

The Confluence server will be temporarily taken down for scheduled maintenance today, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14th, 2013 from approximately 3:00PM ET until 4:00PM ET. You may experience some difficulty accessing the Earthdata Wiki during this time.

Now that AGU, the holidays, and the ESIP meeting are out of the way, we can get started with the new ESDSWG working groups. I will shortly be sending the working group technical chairs the lists of people who expressed interest in each of the working groups at the ESDSWG meeting and inviting the WG chairs to get in contact with the WG membership to initiate the activities described in their action plans. Some of those action plans are still undergoing a bit of fine-tuning but the WG chairs and ESDIS POCs should be getting them finalized in the next week or so.

I realize that not everyone was able to attend the ESDSWG meeting, may not have entered their working group preferences on the proposal assessment survey, or may have since changed their minds about which working groups they would like to work with; that's not a problem. The WG chairs will initially reach out to the people who expressed an interest at 'contributor' level or above and ask them to confirm their continued interest in contributing to the working group. If you want to be added to the contributor list for a working group, please contact the relevant WG chair directly and let me know so that I can keep track of where everyone is supposed to be. Based on the initial responses, it looks like we have a reasonable spread of participation across the WGs. In the event that one or more groups is over-subscribed we may have to ask some people to consider looking at an alternative group but, hopefully, that will not be necessary. If you are interested in following the activities of one of the groups but do not intend to be an active participant (we referred to this as an observer role at the ESDSWG meeting) then you do not need to do anything for now; we will be making separate arrangements for ESDSWG members to follow activities of all of the working groups.

Please note there will be no specific requirement for the WGs to hold open telecons on a regular schedule. It will be up to each individual WG to establish its own way of working and communication. Some groups may choose to only hold regular telecons for the active contributors and more hold occasional open telecons to keep everyone else informed on their activities. Other groups may choose to use the wiki as their primary means of collaboration. Rama plans to hold a monthly status check telecon for the data stewardship interest area (provisionally proposed for the 1st Thursday at 4:00 PM ET) but we will not require everyone in the data stewardship WGs to attend every telecon.

The standards interest area TWGs will be working on authoring or reviewing RFCs and have a very specific role in the ESDIS standards process. We will be coordinating these groups' activities between ESDSWG and the ESDIS standards office and making a separate announcement about the operation of these groups.

We plan to use the new Earthdata wiki (Confluence - http://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/ESDSWG) for as much of our WG collaboration as possible. (For example, the WGs should use Confluence for creating and reviewing draft documents, wherever possible.) Confluence has some interesting capabilities for creating content, sending notifications on content updates, allowing blog postings, following users, and allowing comments on content. I am just starting to learn about some of this but Ross Bagwell and Minnie Wong will be available to help us with some of the technical issues. I would like to avoid setting up separate mailing lists for each of the WGs (although we can do this if really necessary.)

If you haven't yet set up a Confluence account, send an email to Ross Bagwell or Minnie Wong and request an ESDSWG Confluence account. Please make sure that you tell them your URS username or NASA AUID. The old ESDSWG wiki (MediaWiki - http://earthdata.nasa.gov/wiki/main/index.php/ESDSWG) will shortly be decommissioned.

Independent Working Groups

• Cloud Computing. Technical Chairs: Brian Wilson, Emily Law. ESDIS POC: Kevin Murphy.
• Earth Science Collaboratory. Technical Chairs: Chris Lynnes, Brian Wilson. ESDIS POCs: Drew Kittel, Dave Bachelor.
• Geospatial. Technical Chairs: Paul Ramirez, Chris Mattmann. ESDIS POC: Ryan Boller.
• Open Source. Technical Chairs: Chris Mattmann, Bob Downs. ESDIS POC: Kevin Murphy.
• Semantic Mashups. Technical Chairs: Brian Wilson + TBA. ESDIS POC: Luther Lighty.
• Technology Infusion. Technical Chair: Karen Moe, Hook Hua. ESDIS POC: Jeff Walter.
• User Needs Analysis. Technical Chairs: Chris Lynnes, Vicky Wolf. ESDIS POC: Nate James.
• Visualization. Technical Chairs: Charles Thompson, Tom Sohre. ESDIS POC: Ryan Boller.

Data Stewardship Interest Area. ESDIS POC: Rama

• DOIs. Technical Chair: Curt Tilmes. ESDIS POC: Nate James.
• ESDS Conventions for HDF5. Technical Chairs: Charlie Zender, Peter Leonard. ESDIS POC: Dan Marinelli.
• Preservation Information Architecture. Technical Chair: Joe Glassy. ESDIS POC: Rama.
• PROV-ES Earth Science Extension to W3C PROV. Technical Chair: Hook Hua. ESDIS POC: Rama.

Standards Interest Area. ESDIS POC: Andy Mitchell

• Datacasting Standard TWG.
• Preservation Content TWG.
• GeoTIFF Standard TWG.
• KML Standard TWG.
• OpenSearch Standard TWG.

A final reminder to the nominated working group technical chairs to review the 2013 action plans and make any final changes as soon as possible. We plan to launch the new working groups the week commencing January 14th so this is your last chance to fine-tune the plans for the new working groups before we formally start signing up the new members.

If you are satisfied with the output from the ESDSWG meeting then there is no need to make any changes but some groups may benefit from a bit more detail (Earth Science Collaboratory?) and others may be a bit ambitious about what can be achieved in one year (Open Source?). We want to ensure that the new working groups have clearly defined objectives, activities, and deliverables for the current year before they start working. The standards interest area TWGs authoring or reviewing RFCs already have fairly well defined tasks within the standards process and do not need to update their action plans.

The technical chairs have been nominated based on preferences expressed in the ESDSWG meeting proposal assessment survey and follow-up discussions. If your circumstances have changed since the ESDSWG meeting and you are no longer able to take a leadership role in one of the working groups please let me know so that we can make appropriate changes. ESDSWG membership is open to ACCESS and MEaSUREs funded participants and volunteers from the NASA Earth science community - there is no additional specific funding available for participation in ESDSWG (with a few previously agreed exceptions for subject matter experts). I am assuming that everyone already has any necessary approval from their supervisor to participate in ESDSWG. Again, please let Jeff and me know if there are any issues that we need to be aware of.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks.

--Steve

Following the review of the 2013 ESDSWG working group proposals, below is the list of working groups that have been approved for 2013, together with the nominated ESDIS POCs and technical chairs.

In the interest of consolidating related, small scale/short term activities, we have created two ESDSWG “Interest Areas”.  These are “Data Stewardship” and “Standards”.  Each interest area has a lead POC.  Each individual task under them will have a Technical Chair/Lead.  Depending on the level of effort required they may or may not have an independent ESDIS POC.  The ESDIS POCs will work with the ESDSWG Manager to prioritize the activities.  Some may start immediately, while others may delay starting until later in the year depending on priority and the availability of resources.

Data stewardship related activities are grouped together for oversight purposes due to their similar nature and the fact that many of the same people are participating in them.

Standards related activities have been grouped together for oversight purposes due to their similar nature and the fact that many of the same people are participating in them.  We are in the process of operationalizing standards related activities under the auspices of what we are tentatively calling the “ESDIS Standards Office”.  However there will be a close relationship with ESDSWG and we will leverage the group personnel by standing up Technical Working Groups (TWGs) for developing and reviewing RFCs and providing expert advice and recommendations to ESDIS. Standards TWGs will no longer be subgroups of SPG.

For Standards activities, in addition to an ESDIS POC and a Technical Lead, we have also assigned a Standards Process Advisor from the ESDIS Standards Office to assist the group with process related matters.  These advisors are experienced staff from the old SPG group.

Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals, participated in a very productive ESDSWG meeting, and contributed to the proposal review process.

Independent Working Groups

• Cloud Computing.  Technical Chairs: Brian Wilson, Emily Law. ESDIS POC: Kevin Murphy.
• Earth Science Collaboratory.  Technical Chairs: Chris Lynnes, Brian Wilson. ESDIS POCs: Drew Kittel, Dave Bachelor.
• Geospatial.  Technical Chairs: Paul Ramirez, Chris Mattmann. ESDIS POC: Ryan Boller.
• Mobile Computing.  Technical Chair: Erik Jasiak. ESDIS POC: Jeanne Behnke. (Update1/14/13: This WG is no longer gong forward at this time.)
• Open Source.  Technical Chairs: Chris Mattman, Bob Downs. ESDIS POC: Kevin Murphy.
• Semantic Mashups.  Technical Chairs: Brian Wilson + TBA. ESDIS POC: Luther Lighty.
• Technology Infusion.  Technical Chair: Karen Moe, Hook Hua. ESDIS POC: Jeff Walter.
• User Needs Analysis.  Technical Chairs: Chris Lynnes, Vicky Wolf. ESDIS POC: Nate James.
• Visualization.  Technical Chairs: Charles Thompson, Tom Sohre. ESDIS POC: Ryan Boller.

Data Stewardship Interest Area

ESDIS POC: Rama

Data stewardship related activities are grouped together for oversight purposes due to their similar nature and the fact that many of the same people are participating in them.

• Operationalizing the Use of DOIs. Technical Chair: TBA. ESDIS POC: Nate James. (NOTE: The purpose of this activity is mostly to finalize recommendations for DOI landing pages.)
• ESDS Convention for HDF5.  Technical Chairs: Charlie Zender, Peter Leonard. ESDIS POC: Dan Marinelli.
• Preservation Information Architecture. Technical Chair: Joe Glassy. ESDIS POC: Rama.
• PROV-ES Earth Science Extension to W3C PROV. Technical Chair: Hook Hua. ESDIS POC = Rama.

Standards Interest Area

ESDIS POC: Andy Mitchell

Note that the activities listed below are divided into two groups, RFC Review and RFC Authoring.  The items under RFC Review already have RFCs written and just need to be reviewed. The items under RFC Authoring need RFCs written.  The Technical Chairs for these tasks serve as either the lead reviewer or the lead author, depending on the nature of the task. 

RFC Review Activities/Groups:

• Datacasting Standard TWG.  Technical Chair/Lead Reviewer = Brian Duggan. Standards Process Advisor = Allan Doyle. ESDIS POC = Andy Mitchell.
• Preservation Content TWG.  Technical Chair/Lead Reviewer = TBA. Standards Process Advisor = Helen Conover. ESDIS POC = Rama.

RFC Authoring Activities/Groups:

• GeoTIFF Standard TWG.  Technical Chair/Lead Author = Saurabh Channan. Standards Process Advisor = Allan Doyle. ESDIS POCs = Drew Kittel and Steve Bailey.
• KML Standard TWG.  Technical Chair/Lead Author = David Cuddy. Standards Process Advisor = Yonsook Enloe. ESDIS POCs = Drew Kittel and Steve Bailey.
• OpenSearch Standard TWG.  Technical Chair = Chris Lynnes. Standards Process Advisor = Helen Conover. ESDIS POC = Nate James.

Proposals not going forward at this time

There were several proposals that will not be going forward as ESDSWG activities at this time.  They are the following:

• CMS Programming for ESDS
• Data Documentation
• Data Quality
• NASA ESDS Convention for ISO 19115 Metadata