NCSA creates National Data Service
Creating an infrastructure supporting data from across all disciplines of science, engineering, and humanities so that researchers can easily find, reuse, and publish data in a world where researchers generate immense amounts of it daily was the focus of the kickoff meeting for the National Data Service (NDS).
More than 70 representatives from organizations across the United States and around the world gathered in Boulder, Colorado, to begin turning the vision into reality. Organized by NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the NDS consortium is an international federation of data providers, data aggregators, community-specific federations, publishers, and cyberinfrastructure providers brought together to turn the concept of an infrastructure supporting data from across all disciplines of science, engineering, and humanities into an operational system.
The effort builds on the data archiving and sharing efforts already under way within specific communities and unifies them with a common set of tools to eliminate data and computational bottlenecks and advance discovery across all fields. It will be open source, free, and available to all.
Building a global data service will require collaboration among consortium members. Participants at the kickoff meeting discussed the key capabilities of a national infrastructure and the issues surrounding them. These included how the NDS can fit into the publishing process and provide the links necessary to connect literature and data. They also looked at how the NDS can connect to and build on the data infrastructure already in place within specific communities.