NASA's Standards Process Support for New Missions

NASA's Standards Process Group (SPG) facilitates the approval of proposed standards that have proven implementation and operational benefit for use in NASA's Earth science data systems. There are benefits to the NASA Earth science community for having a repository of endorsed Earth science data systems standards that have been successfully implemented and used within the NASA environment. NASA's Earth science data providers can rely on these endorsed standards to achieve interoperability. The SPG is working with NASA's Decadal Survey Missions (e.g. SMAP, ICESat-2, ..) to facilitate the use of NASA's endorsed standards in these future mission data systems. The Standards Process Group is designing a notional reference architecture that together with an as-built architecture documentation can assist missions in identifying where and what kinds of standards they need to develop their mission data systems. We will discuss an overview of the reference architecture and discuss how to use the reference architecture in evolving data systems and identifying standards that are needed. We will discuss real examples of the different types of candidate standards that have been proposed and endorsed (i.e. OPeNDAP's Data Access Protocol, Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Server, the Hierarchical Data Format, Global Change Master Directory's Directory Interchange Format, NetCDF Classic, CF Metadata). We will discuss real examples of the different types of best practices and implementation experiences that have been documented and endorsed as Technical Notes (i.e. Interoperability between OGC CS/W and WCS Protocols, Lessons Learned Regarding WCS Server Design and Implementation, Mapping HDF5 to DAP2, Creating File Format Guidelines - The Aura Experience, ECHO Metadata) But are there any benefits to communities who propose the RFCs for consideration as a NASA Earth science data systems standard? We have seen that the Standards Process encourages consensus within a community during the phase. It can grow the use of common practices among related activities. Once the standard is endorsed, other discipline communities can learn from the successful practice and also use it. The adoption of the standard lowers the barriers to entry and use of NASA data by external discipline communities within NASA and outside NASA. 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. 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.