Draft Invitation Letter

At the last meeting, we talked about sending an invitation letter out to the NDS membership. Below is a draft letter for group comment/editing.

Invitation to participate in the NDS Universally Accessible Data Publications Pilot project

Interested in Data Reuse? Making a broad range of published data accessible across the ecosystem of tools and services is integral to the NDS Vision, yet today there is no standard way to retrieve data, or even full data descriptions given a data publication's persistent identifier.

The Universally Accessible Data Publications pilot project, open to all members of the NDS community, intends to take a key step forward in realizing this vision: agreeing on a standard mechanism(s) for any application or service to access the full set of data and metadata comprising a data publication, regardless of the identifier type and the source of the publication.

Today, knowing the persistent identifier of a dataset – from a catalog or citation in a paper – will usually get you to a web page, but what you find there, and how you navigate from there to download data object(s), are completely idiosyncratic. Further, there may or may not be a way for programs to retrieve the data.  While this makes it challenging for a human to manually bring together data from multiple sources, the lack of standards means custom code is required for any automation.

The work in this project is intended to make it possible for any data catalog, domain analysis tool, data management system, provenance service, or other data service to begin to work with publications from any participating repository, enabling a researcher to, for example, drop the ID of a publication in an analysis application, identify a file of interest from the metadata and links it can display, and have that file directly retrieved so analysis can begin.

The UADP Pilot group has grown out of discussions at recent National Data Service Consortium meetings on interoperability, e.g. between various NSF DataNet and Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) supported efforts, and across institutional, project, domain, and national repositories.

If you’ve participated in those discussions, or are otherwise interested in achieving a practical solution to universal accessibility across data publications, please join us!

For further information:

• See the UADP Pilot proposal at https://nationaldataservice.atlassian.net/wiki/display/NDSC/Universally+Accessible+Data+Publications+Pilot and the associated wiki information linked from within it that provides additional detail, background information on current practices and potential directions for solutions, and comparisons with related efforts.
• Contact Jim Myers (myersjd@umich.edu) or other group members directly.

To join the group:

• Join the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/universally-accessible-data-publications-pilot and introduce yourself!
• Attend the monthly meeting (next meeting in February, schedule to be announced)
• Add information about your project’s current practices or ideas about implementation to the wiki (sign-up for an account at https://nationaldataservice.atlassian.net/admin/users/sign-up)