The major goals are to:
Implement national data grid
- Federate existing discipline-specific data management systems to enable national research collaborations
Enable collaborative research on shared data collections
- Manage the collection life cycle as the user community broadens
Enable reproducible data-driven research
- Encapsulate the knowledge needed to conduct data analyses as workflows, and register and share workflows
Integrate “live” research data into education initiatives
- Enable student research participation through governance policies
The federation mechanisms rely upon the ability to manage the properties of:
- Distributed collections-> virtualization of collections
- Manage naming, arrangement, access, descriptive metadata
- Workflows-> virtualization of workflows
- Manage provenance, sharing, re-execution
- Data flows-> virtualization of data flows
- Manage path selection, caching, distribution, access, naming
The DFC has implemented multiple use cases to improve how research is conducted. Examples include:
- Integration of workflow management with data management
- Preservation of stream sensor data for SciON
- Hydrology workflow automation.
- Demonstration of engineering digital library services for CIBER-U.
- Interoperability with DataNet Partners through sharing of data collections.
- Installation of data grid software.
- DataBook display of usage information through a VIVO interface.
- Access to data grids through a web browser and through Unix shell commands.
- Federation of data grids.
Additional use cases that are in progress include:
- Interoperability with DIBBs awards
- Interoperability with the TACC Wrangler resource
- Interoperability with the iPlant Consortium Discovery Environment