International Planetary Data Alliance Options

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An overview of the International Planetary Data Alliance.

The IPDA's main emphasis is to ease discovery, access and use of planetary data by world-wide scientists regardless of which agency is collecting and distributing the data. Ensuring proper capture, accessibility and availability of the data is the task of the individual space agencies. The IPDA is focusing on developing an international standard which allows the following capabilities: query, access and usage of data across international planetary data archive systems. While, trends in other areas of space science are concentrating on the sharing of science data from diverse standards and collection methods, the IPDA shall concentrate on promoting standards which drive common methods for collecting and describing planetary science data across the international community. Such an approach will better support the long term goal of easing data sharing across system and agency boundaries. An initial starting point for developing such a standard will be internationalization of NASA's Planetary Data System standards.

The IPDA has two core goals:

-Developing international standards for data archiving
-Developing interoperability protocols for allowing data sharing among planetary data systems

In 2005, ESA and NASA developed a white paper describing the interoperability needs for integrating the ESA Planetary Science Archive (ESA) and the NASA Planetary Data System. In addition, please see our overview presentation.

If you are interested in finding out more information, you can visit their web site at:
http://planetarydata.org. The IPDA WWW page was
reworked at the beginning of the year. The site offers a public view with the
most basic information and officially released documents. Work on the
IPDA internal site is still in progress. The site is being designed to provide a
working platform for members of an IPDA project.

The IPDA Charter was updated in February 2007. Comments from the
Steering Committee are incorporated now and a last draft is expected by the
end of April. The charter will be finalized in July and voted on at the next
IPDA Steering Committee meeting in July 2007 and will be posted on the
public site.

The Interoperability Prototype work is ongoing. The current work aims to
show that image data from the high-resolution camera of Mars Express,
HRSC, can be queried in the same graphical user interface than the gamma
ray spectrometer data from Mars Odyssey, GRS, using an underlying
protocol. This protocol was drafted in 2006 named ‘Planetary Data Access
Protocol’.

The Core Data Standards project is drafting the core requirements for the
IPDA data architecture. The project members aim to define an initial data
model based on recognized user requirements, standards and a selection of
representative PDS data sets. A draft of a data model has been prepared and
discussed within the project. A White Paper was developed for the purpose
of informing the PDS Management Council on the progress.

International Planetary Data Alliance Templates for the management of the
IPDA projects were distributed at the
beginning of the year as are used as tool by all IPDA projects.


IPDA Project Meetings

12-16 March 2007
The Core Data Standard Project met at the 38th Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference in Houston to review the material generated so
far.

12-16 March 2007
Poster Presentation: “The International Planetary Data Alliance”, by
S. Slavney et al

17-18 July 2007
2nd Steering Committee Meeting of the IPDA, Pasadena, CA

30 July – 4 August 2007
Poster Presentation: “The International Planetary Data Alliance”, by
Y. Kasaba during the AOGS2007 meeting at Bangkok, Thailand

Planned Public Meetings
July 13-20, 2008 COSPAR, Commission B session, Montreal Canada