2016 ESIP Summer Meeting

Watch it live (and after the meeting) here -> http://commons.esipfed.org/node/9014

Fifteen educators selected through our application process will test and refine a range of activity ideas. Participants will make plans for facilitating STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) investigations using recreational drones in clubs, classrooms, and / or science fairs. Participants will also learn about ESIP projects and initiatives that provide learners with opportunities to apply skills in acquiring and using data. AGENDA: 8:30 Welcome, introductions, ESIP overview & distribute assembled drones to participants 9:00 Participant-led intros to safety and documentation (Use B4UFLY app* and fill out a pre-flight checklist) 9:15 Drone Aerodynamics 1: Goal: controlled flight and simple maneuvers. New pilots will be paired with experienced pilots. 10:00 ESIP Education sampler sessions (Three 10-minute talks with connections to drones) 10:30 Meeting-wide Break 11:00 Three more 10 minute talks 11:30 Drone Aerodynamics 2: Running simple investigations Model best practices for safety and documentation (always). UAV payloads and / or other activities for novices; Image gathering challenge for experienced folks. Share all suggested activity sheets and invite exploration, input, and feedback. 12:30 Lunch 1:30 Drone Aerodynamics 3: off-the-shelf and miniature DIY sensors Take your skills to the next level. Explore and imagine new activities. 3:00 Discuss the most effective way to help educators remain motivated and engaged. Assign responsibilities for testing activities. Develop consensus on best practices for activity instructions. Outline timeline and milestones for e-book. 4:40 Evaluations & wrap-up

15 educators selected through our application process will test and refine a range of activity ideas. Participants will make plans for facilitating STEM learning using recreational drones in clubs, classrooms, and for science fair activities. Participants will also learn of ESIP projects and learning activities that give learners a chance to apply skills in finding and using data. DRAFT AGENDA: 8:30am - Welcome, introductions, ESIP overview & distribute assembled drones to participants 9:00am - Safety concerns and Best Practices for documenting Drone Data (review of webinar content revised & updated) 9:30am - Flight school session 1 - UAV payloads / Activity 2 / Activity 3 (Three concurrent activities. Participants will be grouped according to flight experience) 10:00am - Break 10:30 - ESIP Education sampler sessions (~10 minutes each - connections to drones as possible) 11:20 - 12:00 - Lunch (NOTE: ESIP members who make 10-minute talks will be available the last 1/2 hour of lunch) 1:30 - Flight school session 2 3:00 - Break 3:30 - Brainstorm activities for e-book 4:40 - Evaluations & wrap-up

15 educators selected through our application process will test and refine a range of activity ideas. Participants will make plans for facilitating STEM learning using recreational drones in clubs, classrooms, and for science fair activities. Participants will also learn of ESIP projects and learning activities that give learners a chance to apply skills in finding and using data. DRAFT AGENDA: 8:30am - Welcome, introductions, ESIP overview & distribute assembled drones to participants 9:00am - Safety concerns and Best Practices for documenting Drone Data (review of webinar content revised & updated) 9:30am - Flight school session 1 - UAV payloads / Activity 2 / Activity 3 (Three concurrent activities. Participants will be grouped according to flight experience) 10:00am - Break 10:30 - ESIP Education sampler sessions (~10 minutes each - connections to drones as possible) 11:20 - 12:00 - Lunch (NOTE: ESIP members who make 10-minute talks will be available the last 1/2 hour of lunch) 1:30 - Flight school session 2 3:00 - Break 3:30 - Brainstorm activities for e-book 4:40 - Evaluations & wrap-up

15 educators selected through our application process will test and refine a range of activity ideas. Participants will make plans for facilitating STEM learning using recreational drones in clubs, classrooms, and for science fair activities. Participants will also learn of ESIP projects and learning activities that give learners a chance to apply skills in finding and using data. DRAFT AGENDA: 8:30am - Welcome, introductions, ESIP overview & distribute assembled drones to participants 9:00am - Safety concerns and Best Practices for documenting Drone Data (review of webinar content revised & updated) 9:30am - Flight school session 1 - UAV payloads / Activity 2 / Activity 3 (Three concurrent activities. Participants will be grouped according to flight experience) 10:00am - Break 10:30 - ESIP Education sampler sessions (~10 minutes each - connections to drones as possible) 11:20 - 12:00 - Lunch (NOTE: ESIP members who make 10-minute talks will be available the last 1/2 hour of lunch) 1:30 - Flight school session 2 3:00 - Break 3:30 - Brainstorm activities for e-book 4:40 - Evaluations & wrap-up

There is general agreement that managing your research data is important. There is good support for post docs or curation teams putting in the time to prepare the data for the repository. But, it’s not a common belief that everyone has a role to play in data management starting with the researcher. How can we change the value we place on data management. How can we embrace the importance of data management practices throughout the lifecycle. How can we convince our research community to love data management?  

The communication of scientific ideas and discoveries has not kept pace with the overall flow of information across the planet that we seek to better understand, and it is not moving fast enough to address the full breadth of the challenges facing our societies and our environment. On the other hand, we have entered an age where nearly all scientific thought and the execution of our experiments and trials can be encoded in software, opened for broad scrutiny, and accelerate our ability to make new discoveries. In the USGS, we are experimenting with a new method of organizing data, information, and knowledge toward a real time, iterative National Biodiversity Assessment. We borrowed heavily on the ideas and methods for traceability and transparency from the Global Change Information System developed by the US Global Change Research Program but are taking our Biogeographic Information System a few steps further to incorporate live data services and working scientific software. We are building on the idea of flexible Synthesis Compositions that assemble Analysis Packages to communicate scientific findings in multimodal ways from traditional GIS maps and reports to story maps and dynamic web presentations. We are testing ideas for how peer review and agency approvals work in an environment where data and software are the primary products of the scientific process and prose descriptions of scientific findings are parsed down to their simplest essence to explain to humans what is evident in the execution of software algorithms.

So, you’re an early career scientist, or maybe a data manager who’s tired of explaining WHY metadata is important, or a data curator who needs to know how to convert this brand-smackin’ new format into the more tried & true format required by your data repository – doesn’t matter who you are, you need some training about data management related issues!! How do you go about finding the training information you need quickly? Thanks to seed funding from the USGS Community for Data Integration, a Data Management Training working group under the ESIP Data Stewardship Committee is in the process of creating & implementing a moderated, crowd-sourced Clearinghouse. The descriptions within the Clearinghouse for the data management training materials will reside on the ESIP Commons and made widely discoverable through Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This session will demonstrate how anyone with knowledge about data management training resources or events can input brief descriptive information about them, and also search for other resources or events. This brief demo is a preview for a longer breakout session in which we will provide more background, and invite you to give feedback on the interface and functionality of the fledgling resource.  

Big Data means more than just Volume; it can also show up as Big Variety. There are so many science datasets available, that searching for and finding the right one is becoming harder every day. One solution is to return search results with the most relevant ones at the top. Why so difficult? Well, dataset relevancy is a little different than the ordinary relevancy rankings one would use for web pages. Dataset versioning, temporal overlap, spatial overlap, download frequency are all potential means of presenting the datasets most likely to be useful to a user.

Each day, The Weather Company serves users in every country in the world, with forecast data for 2.2 Billion locations, to help them make decisions about their day, and provide government weather alerts for 34+ countries to provide actionable severe weather warnings to citizens.

Thousands of businesses, from aviation and insurance, to grocery stores and major retailers, rely on The Weather Company's services to plan and adjust based on how weather may affect their business and how to in turn, support their customers.

With a growing daily ingest of 100+ Terabytes of data like pollen, turbulence, radar, satellite imagery, traffic, personal weather stations, cars, and smartphone pressure data, The Weather Company helps citizens, businesses, and governments plan before, during, and after significant events to keep people and property safer and help companies understand the impact of weather on their business and take action.

What do a campus tour, a learning-robot, and a subtle murder plot have in common? They are all aspects of this lighthearted tale about a researcher's (nine-minute) journey to increasingly improve how data is communicated.

Details: Tripp Corbett, Christine White, and Sudhir Shrestha (and possibly other willing victims) will show – through an interactive multi-media tale - how to create a story map to share a message and its supporting research with a target community or the public. They will also attempt to stretch the boundaries on what it means to truly understand a dataset. For what we may lack in theatrics, we will make up in good mapping!

 

The Jupyter Notebook environment has become an excellent platform for presenting the utility of LP DAAC web services for a number of reasons. Jupyter notebooks are great for demonstrating real world science use cases; giving a step-by-step account of the data, processes, and services used in a scientific workflows. Notebooks can also bridge the gap between users and their knowledge of web services by providing recipes for web service execution. Finally, Jupyter notebooks not only provide the functionality to create beautiful and informative recipes with narratives that provide context, but also can be easily shared through a variety of mechanisms.

We have many repositories in scientific domains for natural and social science research data, and an increasing expectation that primary research data will be deposited there. Data centers and repositories offer a variety services to researchers for this purpose, and a growing community of data managers and curators act as liaisons between primary researchers and repositories. To understand how to work with repositories, data managers need to know their basic features. Several groups have embarked on a discussion of the landscape of repositories and their services, eg, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), the Council of Data Facilities (CDF), and at a recent workshop focused on planning collaborative efforts among repositories in Tempe, AZ, that culminated in an ESIP cluster (Sustainable Data Management). This session will continue the discussion. We will become familiar with the existing and planned material describing repositories (e.g., from RDA, CDF, re3data.org), and assemble questions asked by curators and researchers when deciding which repositories to contribute to, and how to work with them.

This session aims to discuss the applicability of using User Interface (UI)/User Experience (UX) principles and techniques in evaluating the services offered by data archives/repositories. The session will provide an overview of usability principles and common usability evaluation techniques as well as the different areas in which these principles and techniques could be applied in a data archive/repository setting. The session will also have two guest speakers presenting the usability testing/experience from their respective institutions. Additionally, as an example and using "cognitive walkthrough" as the evaluation method, the session will report on the evaluation results of the data submission process from five different data archives/repositories with geoscience as the focused discipline. By sharing the types of usability issues that user might encounter during a data submission process and demonstrating the potential fixes, the session invites the attendees to discuss whether the application of usability evaluations could lower the barrier to data use, and subsequently, possibly increase user participation in the data archive/repository process. A key aim of the discussion is to show how UX analysis and design need not be burdensome and can yield immediate results. A sample of discussion questions is listed as follows: Are usability evaluations currently being applied at your data archive/repositories? If yes: What are the evaluation techniques used? What are the services areas that have been evaluated? What are the key lessons learned? If not: What are the reasons? What are some of the key motivators that could help in integrating usability tests with the evaluation of data archive/repositories' services? How can low-cost high-speed usability approaches be integrated into a design process? How can you perform 'usability triage' (focusing on important but easy to fix issues)? How can you demonstrate the benefits of improving usability?

In recent years, Linked (Open) Data has emerged as a prominent framework for publishing structured data on the Web adopted by various domains including geosciences. Linked Data allows data from different sources to be interlinked using HTTP Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and be machine-processable in a standard way via the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Interoperability and integration across different datasets are achieved by the use of vocabulary that is agreed upon by the community or standardized by some governance body. Such a vocabulary is often specified in an ontology, which formalizes the semantics of the vocabulary terms being used. The challenge is that many ontologies, including domain ontologies, are too complicated, restrictive, and difficult to use and understand. This makes many linked data publishers avoid ontologies and prefer to simply use less formal vocabulary. Although this allows linked data publishing staying relatively simple, the resulting datasets would only have a low quality metadata, making the datasets harder to understand, interoperate, and integrate. In this tutorial lecture, we shall introduce a modular ontology architecture based on the so-called ontology design patterns, which are sufficiently flexible, easier to understand, and less restrictive, while allowing the linked datasets to be equipped with a sufficiently high quality metadata, enabling interoperability and easier integration across semantically heterogeneous datasets. We will demonstrate how such an ontology architecture works in a data integration setting, catering multiple perspectives from different data providers, as well as accommodating existing vocabulary that are already employed by the community.

NASA's evolving Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) project provides raster imagery for a wide range of geophysical parameters across EOSDIS missions. This imagery is available through a set of web services and associated standard interfaces which facilitate efficient transmission of raster layers to mapping clients which consume geospatial imagery for a wide spectrum of applications. The varied types of Earth science data within the ever-growing holdings of EOSDIS require GIBS to expand and evolve beyond its current operational focus of serving daily global and polar raster composites. This ESIP session focuses on presenting current and planned GIBS development activities for the purpose of soliciting comments, questions, and user scenarios. Topics include visualization support for: Sub-Daily Data (per science product file/granule) - Visualization of individual data files, which typically have a temporal coverage that is less than one day. Common use cases include visualizing single swaths/granules/scenes. Vector-Based Data - Visualization of vector-based data in non-raster formats. Common use cases include client-side styling, efficient tiling scheme's, etc. Considered vector products include orbit/ship tracks, dense data products, and gridded (varying by zoom level) products. Curtains/Vertical Profiles - Visualization of non lat/lon data products that are best visualized along a "z axis", often associated with elevation or pressure level. Interactive Analysis (R&D work) - Data visualization techniques facilitating direct interaction with the source science data behind the GIBS imagery, locally within a browser or science tool.

During the upcoming Summer 2016 meeting of the ESIP Federation (July 19-22), OpenDAP will hold a Developers and Users Workshop. While many topics will be covered, a focus is to capitalize on recent EOSDIS-sponsored advances in Hyrax, OPeNDAP's own software for server-side realization of the DAP2 and DAP4 protocols. These Hyrax advances are as important to data users as data providers, and the workshop will include hands-on experiences of value to both. Specifically, a balanced set of presentations and hands-on tutorials will address advances in server installation, server configuration, Hyrax "aggregation" capabilities, support for data-access from clients that are HTTP-based, JSON-based or OGC-compliant (especially WCS and WMS), support for DAP4, use and extension of server-side computational capabilities, and several performance-affecting matters. Topics 2 through 7 will be relevant to data consumers, to data providers and--notably, because all OPeNDAP software is open source--to developers interested in extending Hyrax, building compatible clients, or employing Hyrax as middleware that enables interoperability across a variety of end-user and source-data contexts. A session for contributed talks will elaborate or augment the listed topics. Please plan to attend and to share your own OPeNDAP-related work, whether emphasizing clients, servers or DAP-based middleware. Previous workshops have engendered many interesting ideas, and the most recent one (ESIP Summer Meeting of 2014) yielded participant requests for this year's reprise. Submit ideas for sessions or abstracts for presentations to abstracts@opendap.org by May 31st, 2016.

During the upcoming Summer 2016 meeting of the ESIP Federation (July 19-22), OpenDAP will hold a Developers and Users Workshop. While many topics will be covered, a focus is to capitalize on recent EOSDIS-sponsored advances in Hyrax, OPeNDAP's own software for server-side realization of the DAP2 and DAP4 protocols. These Hyrax advances are as important to data users as data providers, and the workshop will include hands-on experiences of value to both. Specifically, a balanced set of presentations and hands-on tutorials will address advances in server installation, server configuration, Hyrax "aggregation" capabilities, support for data-access from clients that are HTTP-based, JSON-based or OGC-compliant (especially WCS and WMS), support for DAP4, use and extension of server-side computational capabilities, and several performance-affecting matters. Topics 2 through 7 will be relevant to data consumers, to data providers and--notably, because all OPeNDAP software is open source--to developers interested in extending Hyrax, building compatible clients, or employing Hyrax as middleware that enables interoperability across a variety of end-user and source-data contexts. A session for contributed talks will elaborate or augment the listed topics. Please plan to attend and to share your own OPeNDAP-related work, whether emphasizing clients, servers or DAP-based middleware. Previous workshops have engendered many interesting ideas, and the most recent one (ESIP Summer Meeting of 2014) yielded participant requests for this year's reprise. Submit ideas for sessions or abstracts for presentations to abstracts@opendap.org by May 31st, 2016.

This Workshop continues the theme of a similar session (jointly Ag&Climate Cluster and Energy & Climate Workgroup) at the ESIP Winter Meeting in Washington, DC on CDI (Climate Data Initiative), CRT (Climate Resilience Toolkit), and ongoing work that could form the bases for CRT Case Studies. Workshop agenda: - Introduction to the workshop, logistics, etc. - Connection with the Telling Your Science Story session; larger goal to establish a CRT pipeline at the ESIP level - Introduction to CRT, LuAnn Dahlman - Brief description of work related to agriculture that forms the basis for a potential CRT Case Study --- Forrest Melton (NASA Ames) et al. Satellite Mapping of Drought Impacts on Agricultural Production and Land Fallowing in California's Central Valley The ongoing drought in California substantially reduced surface water supplies for millions of acres of irrigated farmland in California's Central Valley. Rapid assessment of drought impacts on agricultural production can aid water managers in assessing mitigation options, and guide decision making with respect to mitigation of drought impacts. Satellite remote sensing offers an efficient way to provide quantitative assessments of drought impacts on agricultural production and increases in fallow acreage associated with reductions in water supply. A key advantage of satellite-based assessments is that they can provide a measure of land fallowing that is consistent across both space and time. We describe an approach for monthly and seasonal mapping of fallow agricultural acreage developed as part of a joint effort by USGS, USDA, NASA, and the California Department of Water Resources to provide timely assessments of land fallowing during drought events. This effort has used the Central Valley of California as a pilot region for development and testing of an operational approach. To provide quantitative measures of fallow agricultural acreage from satellite data early in the season, we developed a decision tree algorithm and applied it to timeseries of data from Landsat TM, ETM+, OLI, and MODIS. Our effort has been focused on development of indicators of drought impacts in the March - September timeframe, based on measures of crop development patterns relative to a reference period with average or above-average rainfall. To assess the accuracy of the algorithms, monthly ground validation surveys were conducted across 670 fields from March - September in 2014, 2015, and 2016. We present the approach, along with updated results from the accuracy assessment, and data and maps of land fallowing in the Central Valley. --- Phu Nguyen (UC Irvine) et al. RainSphere - a new tool for analysing global remotely sensed rainfall estimates RainSphere (hosted at http://rainsphere.eng.uci.edu) has recently been developed by the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at the University of California, Irvine for scientific studies and applications, using precipitation estimation from remotely sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks - Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR, Ashouri et al. 2015). RainSphere has functionalities allowing users to visualize and query spatiotemporal statistics of global daily satellite precipitation for the past three decades. With a couple of mouse-clicks, users can easily obtain a report of time series, spatial plots, and basic trend analysis of rainfall for various spatial domains of interest, such as location, watershed, basin, political division, and country, for yearly, monthly, monthly by year, or daily. RainSphere allows data to speak for themselves in a way that is easily understandable by the public, thus helping to increase the number of informed participants in the conversation on climate and climate variability. - Two concurrent breakout groups, one for each of the presenters and led by them. The groups discuss and draft the incipient CRT Case Studies, using the CRT "templates." - The groups recombine and share results, thoughts, next steps, etc.

Agile data curation takes the principles of agile software development and maps them into data curation and management. The underlying principles to Agile Data Curation are a reapplication of agile software development principles to data management. A core principle of agile software development and data curation is the incremental creation of value through iterative development accompanied by frequent release. This is similar to the MPLP (More Product Less Process) idea [1] that advocates for minimal processing in order to reduce backlogs and increase access to collections. After a brief introduction to what is meant by agile curation and MPLP, we will solicit exemplars of agile curation (though it might not have been conceptualized as such at the time) in practice from participants. This will include how users/agencies have handled finding and using existing data, in-project data management, strategies for developing data documentation, and transitioning data products and documentation into systems that enable preservation, discovery and reuse. In particular, we are seeking exemplars of how agencies/users have adopted a "get it done" attitude rather than "get it perfect" mentality. Participants could be data curators, data managers, or data users, who are interested in sharing their experience. Then we plan to map the exemplar practices to the foundational principles and through comparison learn lessons for future application and begin the process of translating principles into practices that are aligned with the best exemplars out there. [1] Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner (2005) More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing. The American Archivist: Fall/Winter, Vol. 68, No. 2, pp. 208-263. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863 Agenda (11:00 - 12:30 Friday, July 22) 11:00 - 11:15 Conceptual Overview (Benedict, Lenhardt, Young) This overview will provide the current state of the mapping of the concepts from agile software development into the data curation space with the goal of explicitly addressing a need to define the underlying conceptual foundation for data curation that embraces the values of flexibility, openness, responsiveness to user's (and reuser's) needs, and efficiency in the development of data curation workflows and strategies. 11:15 - 12:00 Case studies - examples and disussion of a strategy and technical approach for collecting case studies to inform the development of agile data curation design patterns (all attendees - moderated by Benedict & Hills) This part of the session will focus on identifying some key examples of intentional or unintentional agile data curation case studies in an effort to have some concrete examples that we can work from in developing our strategy for collecting key elements of those case studies as input to idendifying common characteristics - ultimately feeding into a set of agile data curation design patterns that are reusable by new research data curation projects. 12:00 - 12:30 Discussion and feedback on draft Values and Principles as derived from the agile software curation principles. https://osf.io/d2bac/wiki/Draft%20Agile%20Data%20Curation%20Values%20and%20Principles/ This will be a discussion that focuses on iteration on the draft language that has been developed for what the underlying values and principles of agile data curation should be. This will be the first time we have expanded to discussion of these values and principles outside of our research team and marks the beginning of an extended community dialog about them.

In 2016, ESIP plans to make changes to its websites and community workspaces, including esipfed.org, the Commons, Wiki and Testbed. We'll present proposed changes to the sites and hold this brainstorming session to get input from the community on these, as well as input on additional ways to improve the sites to create a better user experience. Attendees should come prepared to help identify the challenges and obstacles the community faces when visiting the ESIP sites to find information and add content. We want to understand user pain points, the flow of users through the ESIP sites, and how users access the information on the sites. All perspectives are welcome.

This working session is a writing lab for people interested in gaining hands-on experience in science storytelling, whether you're interested in blogging, authoring case studies or other writing and communication projects. We'll explore the process of translating science to story and then spend time putting this into practice. You'll leave the session with a better idea of how to describe your research in non-technical terms and strategies you can use on future writing and communication projects. This session is intended as a follow on to the workshop on developing Climate Resilience Toolkit (CRT) Case Studies and the Agile Data Curation in the Wild - What's Your Story? session, but all are welcome to attend. We'll break into two groups for the writing portion of the session: one composed of people working on case studies and the other for people working on other writing projects.