Ensuring and Improving Information Quality for Earth Science Data and Products – Role of the ESIP Information Quality Cluster

Quality of Earth science data products is always of concern to users regardless of the type of products. The following represent four unique aspects, the collection of which constitutes information quality: science, product, stewardship and service. With increasing requirements on ensuring and improving information quality coming from multiple government agencies and throughout industry, there have been considerable efforts toward improving information quality during the last decade, much of which has not been well vetted in a collective sense until recently. Given this rich background of prior work, the Information Quality Cluster (IQC), established within the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) in 2011, and reactivated in the summer of 2014, has been active with membership from multiple government agencies, institutions, and organizations. The vision of IQC is “to become internationally recognized as an authoritative and responsive resource of information and guidance to data providers on how best to implement data quality standards and best practices for their science data systems, datasets, and data/metadata dissemination services.” IQC’s objectives and activities, aimed at ensuring and improving information quality for Earth science data and products, are discussed briefly, including recent development and evaluation of use cases. During 2016, several members of the IQC have led the development and assessment of four use cases. The purpose of IQC’s use cases is to identify issues related to collecting and conveying quality information to users, and recommending improvements for implementation by data producers and data distributors. An accompanying poster (Peng, Ramapriyan, and Moroni: http://commons.esipfed.org/node/9625) presents in more detail how various maturity matrices address and support the four aspects of information quality mentioned above.