Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving

TL;DR

This paper discusses the evolving challenges of scientific data publication, curation, and archiving, emphasizing the need for long-term preservation strategies and illustrating these concepts through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey example.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for scientific data publication and preservation, highlighting the importance of managing data versions and long-term accessibility.

Findings

Data publication is becoming a major project component.

Metadata is ephemeral but essential for data reconstruction.

Long-term data preservation leads to data inflation.

Abstract

Science projects are data publishers. The scale and complexity of current and future science data changes the nature of the publication process. Publication is becoming a major project component. At a minimum, a project must preserve the ephemeral data it gathers. Derived data can be reconstructed from metadata, but metadata is ephemeral. Longer term, a project should expect some archive to preserve the data. We observe that pub-lished scientific data needs to be available forever ? this gives rise to the data pyramid of versions and to data inflation where the derived data volumes explode. As an example, this article describes the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) strategies for data publication, data access, curation, and preservation.