NASA's Earth Science Data Systems Standards Process

Starting in January 2004, NASA instituted a set of internal working groups to develop ongoing recommendations for the continuing broad evolution of Earth Science Data Systems development and management within NASA. One of these Data Systems Working Groups is called the Standards Process Group (SPG). This group's goal is to facilitate broader use of standards that have proven implementation and operational benefit to NASA Earth science by facilitating the approval of proposed standards and directing the evolution of standards. We have found that the candidate standards that self defined communities are proposing for approval to the SPG are one of 3 types: (1) A NASA community developed standard used within at least one self defined community where the proposed standard has not been approved or adopted by an external standards organization and where new implementations are expected to be developed from scratch, using the proposed standard as the implementation specification; (2) A NASA community developed standard used within at least one self defined community where the proposed standard has not been approved or adopted by an external standards organization and where new implementations are not expected to be developed from scratch but use existing software libraries or code;. (3) A standard already approved by an external standards organization but is being proposed for use for the NASA Earth science community. There are 3 types of reviews potentially needed to evaluate a proposed standard: (1) A detailed technical review to determine the quality, accuracy, and clarity of the proposed specification and where a detailed technical review ensures that implementers can use the proposed standard as an implementation specification for any future implementations with confidence; (2) A "usefulness" user review that determines if the proposed standard is useful or helpful or necessary to the user to carry out his work; (3) An operational review that evaluates if the proposed standard works in an operational setting in a NASA environment with NASA data. We will discuss real examples of the different types of candidate standards that have been proposed (i.e. OPeNDAP's Data Access Protocol, Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Server, and the Hierarchical Data Format), the issues with the original Standards Process that arose, and the modifications to the Standards Process that we are envisioning as a result.