Table 1
Study projects. Projects included in the study and some defining characteristics.
| PROJECT NAME & WEBSITE | SUB-SAMPLE GROUP | ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE | YEAR FOUNDED | CURRENT STAFF |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BCO-DMO Biological & Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office www.bco-dmo.org | Database | University hosted, NSF funded | 2006 | 5 |
| ESIP Earth Science Information Partners esipfed.org/ | Framework | 501(c)3 | 1998 | 5 |
| Force11 Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship force11.org | Framework | 501(c)3 | 2011 | 16 |
| HDF Group Hierarchical Data Format Group www.hdfgroup.org | Middleware | 501(c)3 | 2006, NCSA 1988 | 20 |
| IEDA Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance www.iedadata.org | Database | University hosted, NSF funded | 2010 (web site copyright) | 14 |
| IRIS Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology www.iris.edu/hq/ | Database | NSF funded | 1984 | 50 |
| OGC Open Geospatial Consortium www.ogc.org/ | Framework | 501(c)3 | 1994 | 20 |
| OPeNDAP Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol www.opendap.org | Middleware | 501(c)3 | 2000, University of Rhode Island 1993 | 5 |
| PaleoDB Paleobiology Database paleobiodb.org | Database | NSF Funded | 1998 | 3 |
| SERC Science Education Resource Center serc.carleton.edu/ | Database | University hosted, NSF funded | 2001 | 19 |
| Unidata www.unidata.ucar.edu/ | MIddleware | UCAR hosted, NSF funded | 1984 | 20 |
[i] NSF = National Science Foundation; 501(c)3 = a type of legal status for a non-profit organization in the United States; NCSA = National Center for Supercomputing Applications; UCAR = University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Figure 1
Evolution of the structural changes over time of the studied projects. Nine of the eleven projects transitioned to some form of stable funding and all but one either formed or became part of a formal organization capable of long-term operation. Note that the exact position within the quadrants has no particular meaning, except for 2F, which started as neither a project nor an organization but as an agency program.
*Facility is used here in vernacular sense and is not limited to the way funding agencies (e.g., NSF) define the term.