Objectives: NASA's science mission directorate acknowledges the need to bring together members of scientific communities relevant to NASA in order to: 1) encourage and facilitate the use of mission…

Objectives: NASA's science mission directorate acknowledges the need to bring together members of scientific communities relevant to NASA in order to: 1) encourage and facilitate the use of mission data; 2) increase the efficiency of investigators through the open exchange of ideas; 3) expose investigators to new subject areas. The federation of earth science information partners (ESIP) is a broad-based, distributed community that voluntarily comes together to leverage the synergies of collaboration in order to improve earth science data use. NASA formed ESIP in 1998 in response to a national research council recommendation calling for the involvement of community stakeholders in the development of NASA's eosdis as a critical element of the U.S. Global change research program. As highlighted in NASA's 2010 science plan, a key principle is active participation by the research community beyond NASA. ESIP community members span economic sectors and are involved in a wide variety of activities to produce, interpret and develop applications for earth and environmental science data. IT now includes more than 125 member organizations, including NASA, NOAA and USGS earth observing data centers, government research laboratories, research universities, education resource providers, technology developers, and various nonprofit and commercial enterprises. Further, the ESIP federation enables effective international and interagency partnerships that leverage NASA resources and extend the reach of science results. The ESIP federation's interagency partnerships continue to grow as do its collaborations with international efforts through GEO, AGU and ceos. Finally, the NASA mandate includes broad public communication of science results. Through the ESIP education committee S leadership and through other outreach and engagement efforts, the ESIP federation is providing additional channels for NASA science results to extend beyond the research community. As an organization, ESIP optimizes networking and connections through in-person meetings and virtually through collaboration space on the web. This networked, community-driven approach allows data interoperability a greater chance of success since IT provides coordinated efforts across domain-specific communities. Ultimately, this improved interoperability will allow earth science research to be of higher quality, done more quickly, and leverage the work of the many communities contributing to earth science knowledge. Methods & techniques: with support for this proposal, the ESIP federation will utilize NASA investments to leverage community expertise to advance data and system interoperability, improve the flow of data to users along the data life cycle and promote the use of NASA research. The two proposed meetings, along with the virtual community support infrastructure, will enable NASA to continue to realize the benefit of its long-standing support of the ESIP federation community. Significance: at the present time, the ESIP federation's wiki (wiki.esipfed.ORG) documents the process and the products of many of its groups. Best practices, community conventions, white papers, scientific meeting presentations and occasional journal articles result from these efforts. The ESIP federation's intellectual commons provides a way to capture knowledge from experts working in the field. These efforts support NASA by: 1) making recommendations on data and information systems interoperability from the community of practitioners; 2) providing external links to end user communities; 3) promoting NASA products to potential users, both in science and education; 4) leveraging a community that draws from other government agencies, academia, commercial and nonprofit sectors to provide best practices and community conventions from a variety of technical topics; and 5) improving efficiencies by reducing redundancy, unnecessary development and coordination across the distributed community that NASA supports.