Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
The core belief of BOAI is that the removal of access barriers to literature will have
a democratizing effect and will result in “accelerated research, enriched education,
and make scholarly literature as useful as it can be, laying the foundation for uniting
humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” The open
access concept has parallels in the data world. In the atmospheric sciences community,
an important consequence of the open sharing ideal has been the free fl ow of meteo-
rological data across geographic boundaries, per World Meteorological Organization
(WMO) Resolution 40, which commits the WMO to broadening and enhancing the
free and unrestricted international exchange of meteorological and related data and
products. The resulting sharing and free fl ow of data meteorological data has had a
noticeable impact on education and research in atmospheric and related sciences, as
illustrated in a companion article by Yoksas et al. (2005).
Another notable IT trend is the desire to integrate all information, including data
and a variety of services behind a single entry point or a portal. Portals often include
personalization features allowing users a tailored view into the information. The cus-
tomization permits: (a) a single point of authentication to validate access permissions
and enable links to available resources and (b) the ability to design a customized view
of available information.
The open access, open source, and open standards are inter-related concepts that
are gaining momentum and developers of data service are aggressively rethinking how
they might both contribute to and benefi t from these trends toward “openness.” The
benefi ts of open access, open source, and open standards are numerous and when they
are combined the benefi ts can be even greater.
Open source software is software that includes source code and is usually available
at no charge. The open source model for software has many benefi ts, as articulated in a
collection of essays by Raymond (1999). For instance, it has the advantage of harness-
ing the collective wisdom, experiences, expertise, and requirements of large commu-
nities. Drawing upon the Linux development experience and based on his successful
open source software project,
fetchmail
, Raymond makes a compelling argument for
the proposition that, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” and for the impor-
tance of treating users as co-developers. Additional features and benefi ts include scal-
ability, extensibility, and customizability. For example, people using a wide variety of
hardware platforms, operating systems, and software environments can test, modify,
and run software on their system to test for portability. Successful open source develop-
ment efforts also do not start from scratch but rather try to adapt and build on top of
existing code base, using the community process for refi nement and reuse.
In the data services area, many excellent examples of open source software that are
highly reliable and supported by a large community exist. They include Linux, Apache,
MySQL, and similar projects. Network Common Data Form (netCDF), Open-source
Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP), Thematic Realtime Envi-
ronmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS, Domenico et al., 2002) are leading
examples of open source software in the geosciences data infrastructure area. Because
of its free and open source nature, netCDF software has been incorporated into over
