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Delivering NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Data with Digital Content Repository Technology: A Software System to Promote Best Practice in Digital Provenance and Effective Access of Content and Associated Metadata
Digital content, including Earth Science observations and model output, is an essential part of contemporary scientific research activities. Not only is the rate of archiving for such content increasing rapidly, but there is also an increase in derived and on-demand data product creation and consumption. As a result of these trends, scientific digital content has become even more heterogeneous in format and more distributed across the Internet. In turn, this makes the content more difficult for providers to manage and preserve and for users to locate, understand, and consume. Specifically, it is increasingly harder to deliver relevant metadata and data processing lineage information along with the actual content, particularly when there are multiple ways of delivering the content, including the increasing use of web services. Readme files, data quality information, production provenance, and other descriptive metadata are often separated in the storage level as well in the data search and retrieval interfaces available to a user. Critical archival metadata, such as auditing trails and integrity checks, are often even more difficult for users to access, if they exist at all.
We propose to address these challenges by using and extending the capabilities of a contemporary digital object repository to work for science data and metadata delivery.