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Part III. Appendix 4: User OutreachAnnex C: Climate Change CommentsNot Yet Fully in Issues• Internet access to data: Knowing what data are available is part of the science. The big changeis the web that makes not only information about the data available (hate to call it metadata)but also makes a lot of the data available online. I think the web is the big area to push and alldata systems should be minimalist systems that simply employ the web for data access and distribution.We should work to build clever interfaces to access the data but we should not inventanother access path. The web is becoming part of daily life and the common man knows howto deal with it. Scientists are generally a bit more skilled with it and so it should become the pervasiveelement of the data system. The role for the scientist is to sort out the crap from the goodstuff....but then that is what they pay us for. The big change is that data is there, is available, canbe ordered, can be worked with. You don’t need an antenna, or to know someone with an antenna.This is all doable with regular internet access. Again formats need to be minimal allowing themaximum number of people access to the data. All efforts to force unification should be avoidedand the web community should vote with its mouse clicks.• Metadata: These are many of the basic problems that motivated EOSDIS and what it was supposedto become. The management of metadata became an all-consuming passion that unfortunatelydid not succeed wildly in delivering more data to us users. The goal is great to have “automatic”metadata that makes it possible to open and work with all kinds of data. The problemis that some specific decisions have to be made and once those are made you life becomes eithersimpler or more complex. The problem is efforts to make universal formats that do everythingfor everybody all fail. HDF has been an outstanding example. While the motivation was fineto pick a standard it has become the source of more difficulty in getting data from EOS instrumentsthan any other. Don’t make metadata rule the data.• Data management: “This is a most abused term…..data management needs to be minimal. Whatwe want is data analysis-enablers to make it possible to work with the data. We really don’t wantthe data to be managed since the end goals are not clear.”• The reality is that when you want to put data sets together you face the music, figure out howto work with each of the datasets and then formulate a strategy to put them together. You needto learn about the instrument, its characteristics, the data, how they are generated and what willhappen when you put the data together. In the present system this largely takes people, mostlystudents, postdocs, etc.263