Preserving, sharing, navigating, and reusing large and diverse collections of data is now essential to scientific discoveries in areas such as phenomics, materials science, geoscience, and urban science. These data navigation needs are also important when addressing the growing number of research areas where data and tools must span multiple domains. To support these needs effectively, new methods are required that simplify and reduce the amount of effort needed by researchers to find and utilize data, support community accepted data practices, and bring together the breadth of standards, tools, and resources utilized by a community. Clowder, an active curation based data management system, addresses these needs and challenges by distributing much of the data curation overhead throughout the lifecycle of the data, augmenting this with social curation and automated analysis tools, and providing extensible community-dependent means of viewing and navigating data. As an open source framework, built to be extensible at every level, Clowder is capable of interacting with and utilizing a variety of community tools while also supporting different data governance and ownership requirements.
The project enhances Clowder's core systems for the benefit of a larger group of users. It increases the level of interoperability with community resources, hardens the core software, and distributes core software development, while continuing to expand usage. Governance mechanisms and a business model are established to make Clowder sustainable, creating an appropriate governance structure to ensure that the software continues to be available, supportable, and usable. The effort engages a number of stakeholders, taking data from diverse but converging scientific domains already using the Clowder framework, to address broad interoperability and cross domain data sharing. The overall effort will transition the grassroots Clowder user community and Clowder's other stakeholders (such as current and potential developers) into a larger organized community, with a sustainable software resource supporting convergent research data needs.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
