Saturday, May 24, 2014

Release the MH370 Data


The world “owes the MH370 families” access to the Inmarsat MH370 data.

How are the MH370 families going to use the data?  Would they accept it in ASN.1 format?  If not, why not?


Various people have called for release of the “raw data,” the “data and the metadata” and the “basic data”.  I have defined these terms in my blog at Data Definitions.

People in the know know that you need at least three levels of “meta” to define data.  FIPS 156 was a standard for an Information Resources Dictionary System (IRDS).  Details of the international IRDS series of standards are to be found in ISO/IEC 10027.

Interoperability is greatly facilitated by a shared Technical Reference Model.  The US Department of Defense developed these as a part of the Corporate Information Management (CIM) Initiative.  A current TRM is available at DOD_TRM_V0.4_10Aug.pdf.

Satellite Communications is shown in context in Figure 6 on page 17 in the above reference.