The State of Building a Consistent Framework for Curation and Presentation of Earth Science Data Quality

Improving collection, description, discovery, and usability of information about data quality in Earth science data products is critical in ensuring data use but requires coordinated efforts of people from multiple disciplines.

Under the auspices of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), the Information Quality Cluster (IQC) brings together national and international data quality management researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to evaluate and establish best practices and standards for data quality for the Earth science community.  The IQC evaluates community data quality best practices and standards; makes recommendations for improvement in various aspects of managing data quality in Earth science data products; ensures that  producers of data products are aware of standards and best practices for conveying data quality, and data providers/distributors/ intermediaries establish, improve and evolve mechanisms to assist users in discovering and understanding data quality information; and provides guidance to data managers and stewards on how best to implement data quality standards and best practices to ensure and improve maturity of their data products.

This presentation will provide an overview on the current state of building a consistent framework for curating and presenting Earth science data quality in terms of science, product, stewardship, and service maturity of individual datasets.  An accompanying poster provides a more detailed review of the purpose and objectives of the IQC, as well as the description of actual use cases that were developed by IQC and evaluated over the Summer of 2016 (Moroni, Ramapriyan, and Peng: http://commons.esipfed.org/iqc_winter_2017).