As many of you know, we at Langley Research Center (LaRC) gave a questionnaire to members of the EOS Data Panel last fall and followed that up with a modified version for the EOS Payload Panel. During the intervening months, I have been working on the analysis of that information and have had considerable help from the LaRC DAAC in putting that questionnaire on-line. We are pleased to announce that both the analysis and the questionnaire are now on-line. We are also making the documentation for the EOSDIS Community Cost Model (CCM) available through this mechanism as well.

The community survey results are at http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/cost_model/survey.html

The material available here includes a "postscript" file with the report analyzing the survey responses for both groups, an ASCII text file of the Data Panel questionnaire, and the responses from these two questionnaires (in tab-delimited ASCII that can be readily imported into most spreadsheets). We have also included the numerical results of the analysis (again in tab-delimited ASCII) and the Ada code used in this work. While the responses, the results, and the code may not be needed by everyone, they are included for those interested.

The documentation for the EOSDIS Community Cost Model is available at http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/cost_model/cost_model.html in the form of "postscript" files. At present, we are working our way through a number of scenarios for planning on production, as well as some more formal material providing an overview of how the cost model computations will be performed. In the next month or two, we will be supplying the documentation for the object model structure of the model itself. All of the documentation is being done with TeX, and will perhaps be migrated to other forms of output. However, the current author does not have time to rearrange the output from TeX to any form of file except "postscript."

If you are coming in through the World Wide Web, the address is: http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/ASDhomepage.html following which you may go down to special services and click on EOSDIS Cost Model to get to the survey and the documentation. The on-line version of the questionnaire is located at the LaRC DAAC whose www address is: http://eosdis.larc.nasa.gov/

To ease submission of answers, the on-line survey is broken into a number of single-page entries that can be answered one at a time. It would make life easier if you could do them all at once, but we will try to work with the answers even if they come in separately.

Kate Costulis has helped me with getting the cost modeling documentation on line within our division. Anne Racel at the LaRC DAAC has done the work on the survey. Their help is gratefully acknowledged.

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