Public-Private Partnerships to Enable Discovery, Access and Use of NASA’s Open Earth Science Datasets

Abstract:

Rapid technology developments are changing the conduct of data-driven research in the Earth science community. Sensor improvements, accelerated data gathering rates, and heterogeneous data types are all contributing to the Big Data phenomenon. The emergence of Cloud Computing now enables processing, storing, and analyses at scale of extremely large datasets. Infrastructures are no longer limited to hardware constraints and could provide a suite of potential services to both process and make Earth science data analysis-ready.

The Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program seeks to address these rapid technology developments by engaging with members of the Earth science community and the private sector working in the area of Big Data and Cloud Computing to evolve current data systems and ensure that data, ancillary information and tools are free and open to all users.

Collaborating with these partners will help the program investigate new strategies to enable discovery, access, and use of high value NASA Earth Science data sets on the cloud with complementary data sets from other collaborating agencies. In addition, they will also help identify gaps and capabilities required to enable new methods for search and discovery and offer innovative solutions for conducting research across large data volumes. In this talk, we will present an overview of current partnerships supporting open data initiatives and share lessons learned from them.