Abstract
Open, interdisciplinary science inevitably relies heavily on standards.
Standards are those often unseen agreements that we take for granted
when systems and processes are working fine. Yet standards work is
perpetual, laborious, and sometimes contentious, especially for
standards to work across diverse disciplines. Standards development,
maintenance, and implementation is a complex, ongoing socio-technical
process. NASA has developed a progressively open science policy and
strategy that calls for the establishment of a data standards process
reaching across the five diverse divisions of the Science Mission
Directorate. This is a delicate exercise. We, therefore, seek to apply a
holistic yet pragmatic approach to developing and maintaining a
standards process. We adopt an ecological philosophy that focuses on the
interactions within the data ecosystem and how standards facilitate
those interactions. We couple high-level analysis with on the ground
experimentation. We began by 1) mapping information ecosystem components
(e.g. data centers, missions, services, protocols, users), 2)
establishing how the components interact (e.g. sharing (meta)data,
funding, personnel exchange), and 3) modelling system dynamics (e.g.
creation of products from multiple data centers, redundant processes,
shared services). The goal is to apply understanding of the ecosystem to
real world applications (e.g. planning a new mission, implementing new
policy requirements, improving process efficiency, etc.). We have also
conducted studies of historical standardization efforts, documenting
lessons learned and cautionary tales. We then contrast this more
abstract work with real examples. We reviewed and assessed multiple
existing standards development processes both within and external to
NASA. We now work to implement an initial test process which can be
further optimized. We seek to define a consistent approach for assigning
persistent identifiers for research objects, especially for the purposes
of citation. The experience from this relatively ‘simple’ test case adds
a pragmatic perspective on how researchers and engineers actually work.
This presentation will review the details of this methodology and our
initial findings.