(US and Canada) Ron Thompson, Chief Data Officer & Deputy Digital Transformation Officer, NASA, speaks with Michal Klaus, CEO, Ataccama, about a CDO’s role in external data management, NASA’s largest data set, and the ideal principles behind delivering data to external users.

Speaking about how his role at NASA is different from a traditional CDO role, Thompson emphasizes that the largest data set for NASA is a publicly available external data set.

A significant part of NASA’s mission is aeronautics research. The organization works with commercial partners and aerospace companies, sharing the research.

NASA’s largest data set is its open science data set which is a part of the agency’s science and research mission directorate. Thompson’s goal is to liberate the data collected on earth and planetary systems. He reveals the agency is working with the directorate to make the data sets accessible and easy to search. While the decades of public data are effective in itself, the current goal is to be more proficient in delivering it.

Elaborating on use cases and how scientists use the data, he cites the example of climate data used to predict floods or wildfires. The data advances science, prediction, analytics, and modeling. The more historical data is introduced, the more accurately the future is predicted. 

For CDOs or digital transformation officers considering public data, Thompson highlights three key focus areas. The first is to adopt standards for interoperability. The second is to keep an eye on data integrity, and the third is to ensure it is valuable to the users.