The Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) Tomorrow: Principles, Challenges, Vision and Future Directions

Building upon the overview of current SPDF holdings, capabilities and activities in the presentation by Candey et al, this presentation will discuss the elements we see in the future evolution of SPDF operations and services. In its role as a heliophysics final active archive, SPDF will continue all necessary and appropriate activities to ensure the preservation and easy accessibility including appropriate browse and display services in multi-mission views of all data held. SPDF will continue to work early and proactively with new missions to encourage their correct use of appropriate data standards while being flexible to accommodate the new science of upcoming missions and constrained mission budgets. SPDF’s current work with e.g. GOLD and ICON to adapt the ISTP/SPDF metadata standards to allow SPDF to ingest/serve netCDF data is an example today. SPDF continues to watch developments in cloud technologies and cloud services in the NASA environment. We will discuss the challenges we see in increasing non-solar instrument data complexity and the effective browsing of burst-type data. We will also discuss how we hope SPDF can better tap/utilize as well as feed the distributed software development and webservices environment evolving in heliophysics, including the challenges of evolution in development languages and standards.