Santa Fe, New Mexico, July 26, 2011 – The ESIP Federation held its summer meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico from July 12-15, 2011, with more than 190 participants attending. Focused on a theme of Data Quality, the ESIP Federation heard from experts, practitioners and users about many dimensions of data quality.  “The ESIP Federation’s community of practitioners came together to improve the flow of data from distributed set of providers to a diverse base of users.” said Chris Lenhardt, ESIP Federation President and DAAC Manager, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  “Data quality is a complex topic. The meeting approached the theme from many different angles, leveraging the many sub-communities’ expertise within the ESIP Federation to gain a better understanding of the many issues at hand.” The outcome from the meeting expanded thinking on quality from one historically focused on validating data integrity to also include the needs of communities that use data.  
 
The meeting included keynote talks from Bill Michener, University of New Mexico (Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) and DataONE projects) and Greg Stensaas, USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center (Remote Sensing Remote Sensing Technologies), exposing the challenges presented by various communities, the need for a quality framework and highlighted lessons learned from large-scale investigations. A data quality plenary panel was also convened with representatives of modeling, science, applications development, education and regulatory communities each providing a glimpse into their respective requirements for quality. Beyond the plenary gatherings, the meeting offered a wide range of sessions that dealt with quality topics from a workshop on encoding quality into ISO 19115 metadata to domain specific discussions in the Air Quality Work Group on specific quality needs.
 
Other meeting highlights included:
·      Quality Workshop on Data Documentation (ISO Metadata)
·      Cloud Computing Workshop and Breakouts
·      Teacher Workshop on Climate Change Education
·      Data Preservation and Stewardship Track (Digital Identifiers, Provenance and Citations)
·      Service Casting, Semantic Web, Visualizations, Drupal and Energy and Climate sessions
 
With interest in the ESIP Federation continuing to grow, it is appropriate that new clusters have formed as a result of the meeting. The new clusters are a Drupal Cluster, CF Cluster (NetCDF Climate and Forecast), and Cloud Computing Cluster. According to President Lenhardt, “The new clusters represent the ESIP Federation’s commitment to providing a venue for the community to address timely topics of interest to many practitioners across the community.  Like the many clusters that came before them, the new clusters are driven by members who want to leverage the ESIP Federation’s expertise in tackling emerging topics.”
 
The ESIP Federation is a consortium of Earth science data and technology professionals spanning government (NASA, NOAA, EPA, USGS, NSF), academia and the private sectors (both commercial and nonprofit). The organization is dedicated to transforming research data and information into useful and usable data and information products for decision makers, policy makers and the public. Initiated by NASA in 1997, the ESIP Federation provides data, products and services to decision makers and researchers in public and private settings. The Foundation for Earth Science provides administrative and staff support to the ESIP Federation.



Contacts:

Chris Lenhardt
President
Federation of Earth Science Information Partners
 
Carol Meyer
Executive Director
Foundation for Earth Science
Tel.:919.870.7140