CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment plans

Data services plans

Building data services for an Earth System Knowledge Environment requires adding collections to the Research Data Archive (RDA), enhancing the capabilities of the Community Data Portal (CDP), and integrating these efforts so they can be used easily and productively with other data from across the institution and outside programs.

Over the past few years, this environment has seen continued development and has progressively improved to be operational in some critical aspects. To meet user requests and provide a system that can accommodate today's and tomorrow's science, continued development on a variety of fronts is planned.

The RDA will be augmented and further integrated with the CDP, and the CDP capabilities will be expanded and further hardened to operational standards. The CDP effort will continue to broaden its activities with existing and new data providers and emerging scientific efforts across UCAR and NCAR, and in cooperation with various university-based programs. A SAN has been deployed providing mutual connectivity between data servers hosting the RDA and CDP. The SAN's storage capacity will be increased and new connections to other data-providing and analysis systems will be made as technological and security barriers are solved.