ESIP FEDERATION: ENHANCING INTEROPERABILITY THROUGH ENABLING COLLABORATION AMONG PRACTITIONERS ACROSS EARTH SCIENCE DOMAINS

As an organization, the ESIP Federation (Federation of Earth Science Information Partners) optimizes collaboration and fosters connections among a community of practitioners across the Earth sciences. Its networked, community-driven approach largely is aimed at fostering Earth science interoperability – for data, systems, people and organizations. A variety of connections are needed across distributed communities to reach consensus on issues around formats, data structures, and management systems between multi-scale models and diverse forcing, parameterization, assimilation, and validation data. This synergy between collaboration, a commitment to openness, and broad practitioner expertise allows the ESIP Federation to play an important coordination role for the Earth science data and technology community. Further, the ESIP Federation is fostering the development of a neutral research community that cuts across traditional discipline boundaries, enabling communities to share tools, data and technology. Ultimately, this coordination across sectors and communities will address problems central to the access and use of Earth science data and information, will allow Earth science research to be of higher quality and done more efficiently, and will leverage the work of the many communities contributing to Earth science knowledge.