ESIP-EarthCube Collaboration

The NSF-funded EarthCube program and ESIP have a strong interest in establishing a close partnership between the two organizations. For that main reason, EarthCube became a Type V member in summer 2016. There are significant opportunities to achieve mutual gain by leveraging the expertise of the respective communities, which already have a large overlap in membership, and through synergistic projects and other forms of collaboration.
The collaboration between ESIP and EarthCube will also be key to building consensus on technical standards and ensuring interoperability of distributed geoscience cyberinfrastructure. ESIP has achieved community governance and sustainability over the last nearly 20 years, making it the go-to place for cutting edge Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) discussions and work. EarthCube and ESIP will accrue mutual benefits because it is one way to ensure that the EarthCube systems will align and contribute to work going on in the larger ESSI community, with the best case being the adoption of EarthCube tools by other ESIP partners.
There are a number of other potential areas of collaboration between EarthCube and ESIP, including in the area of testbed activity and assessment framework. ESIP has developed a well-formulated framework for evaluating the technology readiness level of information technologies, tools, and software. As EarthCube moves forward, a key component of the Roadmap implementation is the assessment of funded projects and development of an evaluation framework. EarthCube can leverage ESIP’s framework in evaluating the maturity and readiness level for integration into EarthCube’s cyberinfrastructure and exploit the synergies between the two similar activities.
In summary, we believe that by virtue of working together, ESIP and EarthCube will experience the network effect, enabling a more coordinated cyberinfrastructure across domain-specific communities and benefiting science in ways that we can only imagine. The purpose of this breakout session is to engaged in a focused discussion to establish a closer partnership between ESIP and EarthCube and to explore specific opportunities for collaboration.