NSF's DataNet Partners so far: Data Conservancy and DataONE

Last spring, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure of the NSF announced its plan to support data preservation and access through the Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet) grant program. The program aims to address "one of the major challenges of this scientific generation: how to develop the new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams." Through funds from the grant, "exemplar national and global data research infrastructure organizations," called DataNet Partners, will do just that. These organizations will combine library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise to provide preservation, access, integration and analysis capabilities over a decades-long timeline. As if that wasn't enough, these organizations should also be able to anticipate and adapt to changes in technologies and user expectations, stay cutting edge, and drive research and development. Oh, and one more thing: "potential applicants should note that this program is not intended to support narrowly-defined, discipline-specific repositories." The NSF is holding out for a hero!

Since the solicitation for proposals, two organizations have been awarded grants - both in August. (It seems that TeraGrid is categorized under the program but was awarded its $32 mil way back in '05.) $3.7 mil was given to Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins University in order to create the Data Conservancy (DC). Along with a long list of partners from universities and scientific organizations, Johns Hopkins will create "a new model in which libraries regard digital data as a special collection that must be maintained and served like their other collections." The Data Conservancy is concerned with the global carbon cycle and the carbon-climate-human system. The second award was given to William Michener of University of New Mexico and a ton of other partners including the CDL, Amazon, UIC, and Intel. That $12.3 million award is for the creation of DataONE (Observation Network for Earth). DataONE will address four challenges: preserving data, providing access to dispersed data, integrating data, and creating best practices for managing data. Its focus is huge: it will make "biological data available from the genome to the ecosystem; make environmental data available from atmospheric, ecological, hydrological, and oceanographic sources; provide secure and long-term preservation and access; and engage scientists, land-managers, policy makers, students, educators, and the public through logical access and intuitive visualizations."

It's interesting to me that both these DataNet Partners are doing pretty similar things, except the scope of DataONE seems to be much larger than that of the Data Conservancy. DataONE was presented at the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories at Georgia Tech in May. The presentation outlines some of the problems we've discussed with putting multi-disciplinary data in one place, but it purports that DataONE will "provide one-stop shopping for data" and will create "investigator toolkit" that will include nifty things like data visualization and Kepler workflow diagrams (remember those?) The presentation also gives an outline of how DataONE will be technologically implemented using the micro-services approach - or an "unbundled alternative to monolithic systems." Both Coudhury and Michener will speak at the next Educause conference in November, along with our pal Clifford Lynch, in a session called "Initiatives from the NSF's DataNet Program: DataONE and the Data Conservancy."