This page covers some of the overall principles that the project is trying to implement. In part this page is here to answer questions about what the rules or policies of the project are. Most of these have to do with the fact that the ICE-D databases are more informal than conventional scientific data archives and are pretty vague about how data get in the databases, and what you are supposed, or not supposed, to do with them once they are there. This seems weird to many scientists who are used to working with conventional archives. This page is supposed to explain the underlying thinking behind our approach, which is mostly based on the principle that the ICE-D project is supposed to be a forward-looking research tool and not a backward-looking archive.