Date

Call for Papers
American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2005 Fall Meeting
Session IN 03: Emerging Better, or Best, Practices for Distributed Data Systems
and Virtual Observatories
5-9 December 2005
San Francisco, California

For further information on the AGU 2005 Fall Meeting, please go to:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm05/


The following session will be held during the AGU 2005 Fall Meeting:

IN 03: Emerging Better, or Best, Practices for Distributed Data Systems
and Virtual Observatories

It is now at least five years since the virtual observatory (VO)
paradigm appeared and about fifteen years since distributed data systems
(DDS) started appearing. These efforts have produced numerous successes,
failures, lessons, new concepts, new designs, and copious experience
with changing technologies. Science communities and agencies stand ready
to utilize these concepts to their fullest extent in meeting the
challenging explosion of data from instruments and models in the present
and next decade.

However many questions remain:
- Are VOs (or an analog paradigm in fields where 'observatories' are not
the usual construct) changing, or ready to change, the way our
communities perform science on ever increasing amounts and diversity of
data?
- How can heterogeneous and distributed data systems be created, found,
accessed, and lead to new science and understanding?
- How can proper attribution of sources of data be made and tracked in a
data-world that is increasingly 'virtual'?
- How can educators make use of VOs and DDSs that were designed for
experts to use?

To address these questions, this session features contributions from
those involved in VOs and DDS at all levels: science and
education/outreach developers/users, interdisciplinary researchers,
designers/architects, developers, and data providers to contribute their
experiences under the theme of emerging better and where appropriate
best practices.

Conveners:
Peter Fox, HAO/ESSL/NCAR
Vladimir Papitashvili, University of Michigan
Aaron Roberts, GSFC/NASA