Standing Committee Meeting Report Data Services

October 2001

Action Items of the IRIS Data Management System Standing Committee

OCTOBER 18 – 19, 2001

 

Attendees: Tim Ahern, Alan Levander, Guy Masters, Monica Kohler, Stuart Sipkin, Peter Goldstein, Bob Detrick, Ken Smith, Harold Bolton, Pete Davis, Leanne Rubin

Discussion: At the present time, 5 different groups have agreed to build client applications to work with the DMS Data Handling Interface. These include the E&O financed VSN Explorer. It is important for the DMSSC to review progress of these clients.
Action: DHI clients demo at the next DMSSC meeting.

Discussion: It was noted that the uptime of IRIS/University network stations is not very high. This is somewhat surprising since these stations are all in the United States.
Action: Contact the GSN to see what is necessary to rectify this situation.

Discussion: DMS supported software is used extensively by the seismological community. The DMSSC recommends being more proactive about informing the community whenever significant new releases, software bug fixes or other related information is available about DMS applications.
Action: Establish a server for software related issues.

Discussion: Sometimes new releases of software have unanticipated changes in output. This can adversely affect the university community.
Action: Build a test suite of data sets and testing procedures for all DMS supported applications. Always insure that only expected changes in the output of an application take place before a new release is made available to the scientific community.

Discussion: Data flow issues from the GSN to the DMC are handled in an effective manner by having representatives of the DCCs attend DMSSC meetings as ex-officio members. Data flow issues with PASSCAL will more effectively be dealt with by having a representative from the PIC attend DMSSC meetings.
Action: Invite a PASSCAL Instrument Center staff person familiar with flow of data to the DMC attend DMSSC meetings as an ex-officio member of the DMSSC.

Discussion: The DMSSC remains enthusiastic about developments in the FISSURES DHI project. The DMSSC wishes to survey the community to see how many developers would be interested in attending a DMS sponsored workshop providing the details of how to develop clients within the DHI system.
Action: Announce Basic Object-Oriented Training (Boot) Camp, and move forward if more than 15 people show an interest.

Discussion: The DMS questionnaire was sent to additional PASSCAL Pis and graduate students to get a better cross-section of responses. The results of the original survey need to be merged with those later responses.
Action: Alan will send out a summary of the combined questionnaire responses to the committee, who are asked to provide feedback.
Action:
Standing Committee to provide Alan with comments from self-study reports, especially re: PASSCAL interaction.

Discussion: The DMSSC committee discussed potential new members for the DMSSC.
Action: Alan will contact new DMS Standing Committee members after their selection by the Executive committee.

Discussion: It was deemed desirable to produce a strategic plan for the Data Management System to provide longer term directions for the DMS.
Action: Tim will write a straw man of the DMS Strategic Plan for committee review.

Discussion: The need to keep the DMS IT efforts coordinated with those of Earthscope was discussed.
Action: Find out who at EARTHSCOPE is involved with developing information technology within Earthscope.

Discussion: As new data are received by the DMC, much of it lacks standard quality control. The need to develop a method to provide some level of automated quality control for all data was noted.
Action: Tim will draft a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the development of Quality Assurance Frameworks and specific modules.

Discussion: Several potential new activities of the DMS were presented. In order to effectively prepare the
2002 DMS budget input will be needed from the DMSSC.
Action: Committee will provide feedback regarding budgetary priorities.