Tetherless World Constellation

There is growing interest within the broad research community to leverage satellite data for cross-disciplinary analysis and to make use of the data in ways unanticipated by the data provider. Poorly documented or publicized product quality information is a significant barrier to the successful or confident integration of satellite data for many users. Researchers seek clearly and consistently characterized product quality to facilitate assessment of product fitness-for-use. We argue that data product discovery mechanisms should be augmented with facilities to present product quality information; targeted to provide a condensed and clear view of product quality and to support comparison with quality of other like products. We propose a method of provisioning product quality into aspects (e.g. completeness, consistency, accuracy, bias) and displaying computed and inferred facts as evidence to help characterize one or more aspects of the product quality. We describe the product quality ontology developed to facilitate this characterization of product quality. Finally, we illustrate the utility of this approach by showing how we have applied it to presenting product quality for the NASA MODIS Aerosol data product within a prototype implementation of the NASA Giovanni Data Access and Analysis Tool.