Atmosphere - Services Validation |
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A main task of the PROMOTE QA/VAL Office is to manage the top-level definition of applicable standards and validation approaches for all constituents of the Service Portfolio, in order to generate the Service Validation Protocol (C5) that will be applied consistently across the services network.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The second stage of PROtocol MOnitoring for the GMES Service Element (GSE), PROMOTE 2, aims at scaling-up consolidated GMES services for atmospheric monitoring. All services must provide documentary evidence that they fulfil quality standards as well as their own specifications, and that they comply with user requirements. Moreover, sustainable efforts must be envisaged and undertaken to keep service quality at a constant level, and to ensure long term update, availability and traceability of quality information. Appropriate means must be applied during implementation, during operation, and during future updates of the services in order to achieve this quality assurance.
The present C5 Atmospheric Service Validation Protocol outlines the top-level definition of the approach for validating all constituents of the PROMOTE-2 S5 Service Portfolio Specifications. It establishes validation principles that are universally applicable to all products and services. The present, final version builds on general quality assurance frameworks established by high level bodies and standardisation agencies (e.g., ISO/IEC and QA4EO), on more detailed descriptions suitable for each data product and service (e.g., validation methodologies, plans and reports), and on the experience gained and documents generated during the three annual cycles of PROMOTE 2.
The present protocol is formally agreed by all members of the service supply partnership, including research partners, operational providers, and system developers. It is also endorsed by the mandated representatives of the PROMOTE 2 end-user organisations. This includes, as an absolute minimum, the leaders of the User Executive Board that speaks on behalf of the User Federation. The latter is composed of all users that signed a Service Level Agreement (SLA) within PROMOTE.
This document addresses:
• General rules to ensure unbiased, independent and traceable validation
• Definition of the tasks of the research partners, system developers, service providers and core users regarding the various aspects of the services and data products validation
• Definition of different validation levels and top-level validation criteria, review process and decisions sequence
• Requirements for reference data sources and methods
• Approach for validating new products, upgrades, long-term quality assurance, endorsement by key external user-bodies, validation of services (as opposed to the validation of products only)
• Requirements for appropriate and sustainable validation documentation
• Document availability, access and distribution rules
• Maintenance of validation standards, reports and data sets.The validation of each service during its build-up and during it successive updates, is fulfilled by a combination of complementary measures, including the end-to-end validation of individual components of a service chain, the validation of data products and services against specifications, and the validation of data products and services against user requirements.
The material in this document has been subject to technical and policy review by ESA, the PROMOTE Core Management Team and the PROMOTE Service Leaders, and approved for publication with open diffusion. The views expressed by the authors, however, are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of ESA and of all contributors.
Keywords:
Citation: Lambert, J.-C. et al (2009), Atmospheric Monitoring Services - Stage 2 of the Earthwatch GMES Services Element, PROMOTE-2, C5 Service Validation Protocol, Version 3, Issue 0.4
Copyright 2009 by the GSE-PROMOTE project
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