Ignored Issues in e-Science: Collaboration, Provenance and the Ethics of Data

The issues of collaboration, provenance and the ethics of data are not new, but have existed for quite some time. The issue is in how to change the attitudes of the scientists that theses issues are worth their time to deal with, and how the scientists can easily learn what the necessary steps are to ensure that their data can be used by the greater community. At NASA, there have been changes to the heliophysics data policy which now mentions a need to integrate into the larger data environment [NASA, 2009]. This integration aspect is key, as simple linkages between discrete collections are not enough for effective and efficient reuse of scientific data. As each scientific mission funded by NASA is novel in some way, there is a belief by many scientists that every data system must be rebuilt from the ground up as well. Although there are often needs to tune systems to meet the needs of the primary investigation, there are limited, if any controls to ensure that the data systems can interoperate with the system of virtual observatories and other cross-discipline efforts being designed and implemented. We need to find a way to break the 'not-created-here' mentality, and push for PI teams to consider how to support the general science in their discipline when implementing their interfaces. We need to tell them what the requirements are for interfacing with the community search systems, and give PI teams a way to get advice on designing and implementing their data system in a way that doesn't create roadblocks to the greater community's attempts at using their data. If we had simple requirements checklists to explain the needs of each discipline, we could give scientists and reviewers an easy way to guage how useful and accesible the system would be. We present a generic checklist developed primarily for file-based feature and event catalogs [Hourcle, 2009], in hopes of inspiring others to develop similar requirements documents for each scientific discipline and to spur discussion of requirements for databases and other larger data systems. References: NASA. (2009), "NASA Heliopysics Science Data Management Policy: Version 1.1", http://lwsde.gsfc.nasa.gov/Heliophysics_Data_Policy_2009Apr12.pdf Hourcle, J.A. (2009), "Checklist for Building a Data / Feature / Event Catalog", http://sdac.virtualsolar.org/catalogs/catalog_checklist