ESGF Errata Service overview
As part of the ES-DOC ecosystem, the Errata Service centralizes timely information about known issues of ESGF hosted data. The errata database is populated by data providers and in the 2.0 version though community provided proposals as well.
Proper handling of errata information in the ESGF publication workflow has major impact on the quality of data. Version changes should be documented and justified by explaining what was updated, retracted and/or removed.
This is based on an unspoken rule that any publication of a newer version of a dataset needs to have a valid motivation, which we will refer to as an issue. Consequently, the publication of a new version of a dataset, as well as the unpublication of a dataset version, has to be motivated by an issue and conversely.
Note: The issue registration should be executed prior to the publication process and is ought to be mandatory for additional versions, version removal or retraction.
The Errata Service offers to ESGF users to query about modifications and/or corrections applied to their data in different ways:
Through a user-friendly filtered list of ESGF known issues
Through a search interface based on a dedicated API to get the version history of a (set of) file(s)/dataset(s)
Note: The errata service is as project-agnostic as it gets, with minimal to no back-end changes to support new projects. At the present time, CMIP5/6, CORDEX and input4MIPS are supported.
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