National Data Service Enters a New Phase

The U.S. National Data Service (NDS) has enjoyed a very successful initiation phase including the forming of strategic partnerships, numerous collaborations, and seven successful NDS Consortium workshops that have helped frame the NDS's goals. It's time now to enter the next phase of NDS, which will focus on executing commitments with partners and enabling new capabilities. Thank you to the NDS Consortium and Steering Committee for their contributions which have helped the project reach this milestone. These activities, including hosting of NDS workshops, are being paused to allow NDS to work on focused efforts with its partners.

The NDS was founded in 2015, with the goal of driving deeper integration of existing Research Data Management software components and identifying gaps needed to achieve an interoperable "datanet" ecosystem. NDS efforts have been focused in two areas: NDS Labs and NDS Share. NDS Labs offers a platform for experimentation and sharing of data management and analysis software, with the ability to migrate containerized, cloud-based environments where analysis requires scale. NDS Share seeks to use community exemplar software together to streamline access to data and its companion analysis, and to enable easier reproducibility of data-driven research. Because there are many gaps between existing software solutions, NDS has developed a roadmap for a common set of tools, DataDNS , designed to help scientists and researchers find, reuse, and publish data. Building on data archiving and sharing efforts already underway within specific communities, NDS links these efforts together, and in the past two years, has achieved the following results:

• An open source, cloud-based implementation of NDS Labs was created and contains nearly 50 tools for managing research data, as well as software dependencies, such as databases and other cloud-based services.
• A proof-of-concept site was developed for NDS Share, called DataDNS, (analysis currently disabled), that demonstrated the need for web-enabled analysis environments alongside publications and related data.
• The NDS Consortium held seven plenaries around broad, thematic areas or targeting requirements gathering and partnerships, such as the research library-themed NDS6 or the NDS5 workshop that explored the interoperability of existing software building blocks.
• As an outcome of these plenaries, the NDS Consortium identified key communities and partners for anchoring use cases and target areas for deploying tools.

NDS plans to work closely with key community partners, seeking continuous realignment of its goals via their stakeholders. Key partners include:

• Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
• EarthCube , a National Science Foundation project
• GO FAIR , an international consortium dedicated to making data FAIR
• NSF's Big Data Hubs , a National Science Foundation project, especially the Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH)
• Research Data Alliance (RDA-US)

Current projects and data partnerships include:

• ARPAE TERRA-REF , an advanced crop analytics to increase accelerate breeding and the commercial release of high-yield bioenergy sorghum hybrids;
• Bridging Big Data , a bridge health project with Nebraska and the Midwest Big Data Hub;
• Einstein Toolkit , enabling training environments for relativistic astrophysics software;
• Hackathons including ThinkChicago's Civic Tech Challenge;
• NIST Materials Data pilots including a Materials Resource Registry and Materials Data Curation Facility;
• PI4 Bootcamp, a computational bootcamp;
• Sustainable Environment through Actionable Data (SEAD), easy management of data across a broad range of physical and social science disciplines.

To enable a greater focus on these concrete community projects and support success and growth of these partnerships, NDS will refocus its bi-annual consortium efforts instead towards participation in our key partner and stakeholder meetings. You can see the NDS in 2018 at:

• RDA plenaries
• Research Data Access & Preservation (RDAP) Summit
• GlobusWorld
• Midwest Big Data Hub All Hands and Tools & Methods Workshop
• ESIP Summer meeting
• PEARC18
• and more ...

Please join us at these various venues and consider participating in our effort to bring together a national data infrastructure!

• 1/12/2018