Towards the Australian Data Commons

A proposal for an Australian National Data Service

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Data Management

During the course of the PfC facilitation process a number of key workshops were held to determine the activities that might be included in the investment plan to assist research data management, as reported below.

• Workshop 1
• Workshop 2
• Slide summary (ppt 340k)

Following the approval of the investment plan by NCRIS, an implementation workshop was held to confirm the proposal to establish the Australian National Data Service (ANDS).

• Implementation workshop
• Summary of data capabilities

The implementation workshop endorsed in detail the ANDS concept and proposed that a technical working party should be formed to draft a more detailed statement on the purpose and goals for ANDS, beyond the coneptual definition provided in the PfC investment plan.

The result of the activities undertaken by the technical working party is the document published in the link at the top of this page.

Background

Summary of activities leading up to the proposal for ANDS in the PfC investment plan.

The investment plan for Platforms for Collaboration was tasked with considering needs related to Research Data Management and consequently set out to better understand the vision for research data management of the participants in the research sector.

A research data management vision might be expected to address policies and technologies around data access and discovery, storage and management including:

• Policy/Standards/protocols development
• Technology/tools development underpinning services/processes/workflow
• Trusted repositories

The scoping for the consultation is available here, noting that the first purpose of the exercise was to bring together leading practitioners and other relevant informants to provide guidance on:

• The state of national research data management policies and underpinning standards
• The state of frameworks and platforms that could enable national research data management

The first workshop was held on 23 October, information for which is available here. The main outcomes from a 5.16 perspective related to data missions and the issues around which an investment might focus.

Subsequent discussion has led to an increasing focus on accessible data, noting that data proceeds through a curation process as well as a publication process, and that investments by 5.16 being systemic in nature naturally migrate towards services around curated and accesible data. Further thinking is needed around the respective roles of other investors in the data management landscape.

The second workshop was held on 27 November, information for which is available here. Some slides summarising the developing 5.16 perspective were developed for the see-grid workshop and are provided here (ppt 340k).

Following the second data workshop and some further discussions, the following 'next steps' have emerged:

1. explicitly identify the services (such as identifier/resolvers, registries, data movement/replication etc) that are needed and can best be provided 'system wide' along with a scoping of implementations to derive some cost estimates (ball park to begin with)
2. because data becomes most relevant to access following 'analysis' and at the 'publish' step in its life cycle, and as it also seems that the community dependency on shared data and data services also has a development or life cycle, investigate the services related to retention and access to data intended to be shared and around which communities have developed dependencies and develop cost models for those services.
3. set out options on who should determine the criteria for teh allocation of these services to communities, noting that the required harshness of any criteria and restrictiveness of their appliction, are cost sensitive, and we have yet to understand the scale and costs that are likely.
4. develop options on how the services in 1 and 2 interact with or implement elements of a national data management framework, noting that the bulk of data will exist in services funded and operated independently of activities created by 5.16
5. a further meeting is planned around January 23, to bring together communities that appear to be at a stage where dependency on community based data and data services is arising, but which have not yet achieved the status of the 'category A or B' activities in the 'data mission' diagram.
6. meetings are being arranged with other NCRIS capabilities to validate this approach and to determine how layering of services within the data management space with 5.16 may occur; particularly in areas such as 5.13, 5.12 and 5.1.

A final data management workshop was held on the 15 February to finalise content for the ANDS component of the PfC plan, see the submitted plan for the outome of those discussions.