Call for Letters of Interest for Data Product Development
Dear Colleague,
The IRIS Data Management System (DMS) invites individuals at IRIS member institutions to submit Letters of Interest that outline new data product types and related development plans. Authors of selected data product descriptions will be requested to submit full proposals to acquire funding from the IRIS DMS to support the development of the completed product. This is an excellent opportunity for researchers to put forward unique and useful data product ideas, receive funding for their development, and collaborate with the DMS on their presentation and long term management. Typically derived from raw data, these data products can serve many purposes including as a foundation for future research.
The deadline for submitting Letters of Interest for data product development is January 27, 2012.
The goal of the IRIS DMS product development effort is to create data products that complement the raw time series data traditionally managed by the IRIS DMC. The development effort is guided by the IRIS community through the IRIS Data Products Working Group. As a result of this relatively new effort, the DMC current manages approximately a dozen data product types produced either by the community or by the DMC. A list of these product types is available at http://dev.iris.edu/dms/products/.
The purpose of this call for Letters of Interest is to solicit data product ideas from our community of users. After reviewing all submitted Letters, either the DMS Standing Committee or a designated selection committee will request selected authors to submit proposals for funding the development of the data product. We anticipate individual development awards to range between $10,000 and $25,000. All products developed under this agreement will ultimately be hosted and managed at the IRIS Data Management Center (DMC).
The types of data products that might be proposed include:
- Products which serve as stepping stones to further processing, i.e. pre-processing for more advanced processing. Examples include the calculation of envelope functions and the calculation of receiver functions for data in the DMC archive;
- Visualizations of the data in ways that provide insight to geophysical processes and/or the data set. Examples include the DMC's Event Plot suite and USArray Ground Motion Visualizations;
- The "productization" of research results that are useful to a broad range of the scientific community. For example, a database of shear-wave splitting measurements;
- Educational products that increase accessibility to data and information for students and future researchers;
- Modernization and availability of data sets. For example, the conversion of processed geodetic data to formats readily usable by the seismic research community.
Letters of Interest should include:
- A statement of the impact and range of potential uses for the product type.
- Estimates of the resources required to initially generate the product(s).
- Enough detail to help determine IRIS DMC resources required to manage the product type over an extended period of time.
Letters of Interest should be submitted in electronic form (as MS-Word or PDF) to DPDev-letter@iris.washington.edu by January 27, 2012. Letters should not exceed two pages in length. Authors will be notified of their selection status by February 10. Selected authors will be requested to submit a proposal for product development due by March 31.
Funding for the data product development awards and the data product effort at the IRIS DMC is supported by the USArray component of the NSF's EarthScope program.
Sincerely,
Dr. Timothy Ahern
Director of Data Services
IRIS
