Online Scientific Data Curation, Publication, and Archiving
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Date
2002-07Author
VandenBerg, Jan
Stoughton, Christopher
Thakar, Ani R.
Szalay, Alexander S
Gray, Jim
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Show full item recordAbstract
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.