dataconservancy.org

 The Data Conservancy (DC) embraces a shared vision: scientific data curation is a means to collect, organize, validate and preserve data so that scientists can find new ways to address the grand research challenges that face society.  The Data Conservancy will research, design, implement, deploy and sustain data curation infrastructure for cross-disciplinary discovery with an emphasis on observational data.

There are multiple, urgent scientific drivers for this effort. The complex interactions among the atmosphere, the ocean, the land, the biosphere, and human behavior pose daunting challenges in understanding the causes of observed phenomena such as climate change and its associated impact on biodiversity and urbanization. Through collection, preservation and semantic integration of data that are now very difficult to assemble and analyze, the Data Conservancy will transform the ability of scientists to answer grand challenge questions that are important to the nation and the world. The Data Conservancy initial efforts will emphasize astronomy, earth sciences, life sciences, and social sciences data.

Science drivers are the principal and overarching motivators for the Data Conservancy. Scenarios represent the framework through which the Data Conservancy will identify data and services to preserve, discover, use, and analyze for scientific research and education. Additionally, use cases provide a means of breaking down the overarching goal into tractable, near-term milestones through which we can evaluate our efforts and iteratively refine our processes.