Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
High priority ESA LTDP activities for the next 3 years are focused on issues such
as security improvement, migration to new technologies, increase in the number
of datasets to be preserved and enhancement of data access. In addition ESA-
ESRIN is participating to a number of international projects partially funded
by the European Commission and concerned with technology development and
integration in the areas of long term data preservation and distributed data pro-
cessing and archiving. The scope of ESA participation to such LTDP related
projects is: (1) to evaluate new technical solutions and procedures to maintain
leadership in using emerging services in EO; (2) to share knowledge with other
entities, also outside of the scientific domain; (3) to extend the results/outputs of
these cooperative projects in other EO (and ESA) communities.
The ESA role in CASPAR
In CASPAR, ESA plays the role of both user and infrastructure provider for the
scientific data testbed. ESA participation to CASPAR (coherently with the above
guidelines of the LTDP Working Group) is mainly driven by the interest in: (1)
consolidating and extending the validity of the OAIS reference model, already
adopted in several internal initiatives (e.g. SAFE, an archiving format developed
by ESA in the framework of its Earth Observation ground segment activities);
(2) developing preservation techniques/tools covering not only the data but also
the knowledge associated with them. In fact locating and accessing historical
data is a difficult process and their interpretation can be even more complicated
given the fact that scientists may not have (or may not have access to) the right
knowledge to interpret these data. Storing such information together with the
data and ensuring all remain accessible over time would allow not only for a
better interpretation but would also support the process of data discovery, now
and in the future.
20.1 Dataset Selection
The selected ESA scientific dataset consists of data from GOME (Global Ozone
Monitoring Experiment), a sensor on board ESA ERS-2 (European Remote
Sensing) satellite, which has been in operation since 1995.
In particular, the GOME dataset: (1) has a large total amount of information
distributed with a high level of complexity; (2) is unique because it provides more
than 14 years global coverage; (3) is very important for the scientific community
and the Principal Investigators (PI) that on a routine basis receive GOME data (e.g.
KNMI and DLR) for their research projects (e.g. concerning ozone depletion or
climate change).
Note that GOME is just a demonstration case because similar issues are involved
in many other Earth Observation instrument datasets.
