Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving

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. De- rived data can be reconstructed from metadata, but meta- data 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 in- flation where the derived data volumes explode. As an example, this article describes the Sloan Digital Sky Sur- vey (SDSS) strategies for data publication, data access, curation, and preservation.