NASA's Standards Process for Earth Science Data Systems (Invited)

NASA’s Standards Process Group (SPG) facilitates the recommendation of proposed standards that have proven implementation and operational benefit for use in NASA’s Earth science data systems and also reviews and endorses different types of best practices and implementation experiences as Technical Notes. After some initial experience in approving proposed standards, the SPG has tailored its Standards Process to remove redundant reviews to shorten the review process and to improve the Standards Process. The Standards Process can accelerate the evolution of practices through better communication from successful practice in a specific community to broader community adoption to community-recognized standards. We note the contrast to other international standards organizations that develop standards instead of adopting already developed practices. For each endorsed standard, the availability of high quality documentation for the standard, available reusable software, and information about successful operational experience with the use of the standard will help bridge the chasm from innovative use by visionary practitioners to more popular use by pragmatic users. We will discuss real examples of the different types of candidate standards, best practices and implementation experiences that have been documented, proposed and endorsed. We will also discuss future directions for the NASA Standards Process as it applies to NASA’s planned Decadal Survey missions.