Evaluation Challenges for a Federation of Heterogeneous Information Providers: The Case of NASA's Earth Science Information Part

NASA’s Earth Science Information Partnership Federation is an experiment funded to assess the ability of a group of widely heterogeneous earth science data or service providers to self organize and provide improved and affordable access to an expanding earth science user community. As it is self-organizing, the Federation is mandated to set in place an evaluation methodology and collect metrics reflecting the outcomes and benefits of the Federation. This paper describes the challenges of organizing such a federated partnership selfevaluation and discusses the issues encountered during the metrics definition phase of the early data collection. Our experience indicates that a large number of metrics will be needed to fully represent the activities and strengths of all partners, but because of the heterogeneity of the ESIPs the qualitative data (comments accompanying the metric data and success stories) becomes the most useful information. Other lessons learned include the absolute nee...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: WETICE
• Authors: Catherine Plaisant, Anita Komlodi, Francis Lindsay
• Keywords: Data Collection, Earth Science, Earth Science Data, Emerging Technology, WETICE 2000