Folks,
I want to thank you all for contributing to the remarkable National
Data Service (NDS) proposal that we pulled together over the last few
weeks. I really appreciate how everyone on this team contributed to
the final proposal that we submitted last week.
The fact that literally everyone we spoke to about these activities
agreed to join us (over 25 partners around the world) confirmed our
feeling that we have touched on something that is seriously needed.
The idea of creating an "NDS Consortium" emerged as a result of the
enthusiasm we encountered as we were initially developing the proposal
itself. The consortium presently links together NSF DataNet (DataOne,
Data Conservancy, SEAD), DIBBs (Brown Dog, DataScope) and other major
community projects (e.g. ICPSR, ADS); MREFCs (LIGO, LSST, IceCube,
NEON), universities, libraries, and national organizations and
services that connect them (Internet2, XSEDE, Globus); publishers
(e.g. APS, Science, Nature, Elsevier, PLOS, JORS); and important
international efforts (e.g., EUDAT, OpenAire, RDA).
Your support in establishing this consortium of like-minded partners
became a critical element of our proposal to develop an open framework
that supports an integrated set of national-scale services. This idea
is at the core of our collaboration, which goes beyond the NSF
proposal itself.
To advance our common NDS vision, I would like to invite you to
participate in our inaugural NDS Consortium Workshop to be held June
12-13 in Boulder, CO (with kind assistance from CU Boulder, NCAR, and
NEON). This will be our first opportunity to come together and further
refine our thoughts and ideas about an open framework that will
revolutionize how we share data. We recognize that this is quite soon
during a busy time of year, but we hope you can save this time in your
schedule. We will be distributing more details about the workshop
agenda and meeting location soon. In the meantime, we have established
an initial website that we plan to develop further to help draw
attention to our joint efforts (http://nationaldataservice.org)
Thank you again for your extraordinary efforts in helping to define
NDS and we are looking forward to working with all you on the National
Data Service.
Best,
Ed Seidel