After many weeks of work, we are ready to start writing a journal article describing the results of the ESA Data Error categorization, and making recommendations based on the results. There are a few more refinements that I need to make, but these are mostly cosmetic. Many researchers tend to describe their research using vague terms, without clearly explaining what they mean by those terms. The title of this errors category is currently “need to define qualitative terms”. The problem is that this description of the error category could also fit under the error category described as “need to have a clear and accurate data dictionary”. The problem is that these two categories truly are separate things, and the descriptions of these categories need to make this separation clear.
The Data Manager Questionnaire is proceeding along as well. At this point, there are 20 completed surveys, and 25 surveys started. While this is a good start, we need more responses to get the results we need. Based on this, an intern for Bill Michener gathered a list of emails for repositories listed at DataBib (http://databib.org/). Just now, I sent the survey request to those addresses, which should result in more responses to the survey.