A core value proposition of the World Data System in general, and the ITO in particular, is supporting repository managers as they maintain and upgrade their services, fulfilling their technical roadmaps en route to mature infrastructure. This page describes our projects that support infrastructure development, management and deployment.
The Global Open Research Commons
The ITO is committed to contributing to the Global Open Research Commons (GORC), an ambitious vision of a global online set of services that make data, software, computational resources, publications and other artefacts from scientific research easily findable, openly accessible, intelligently interoperable and abundantly reusable. We are developing a roadmap and strategy for the GORC through the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Global Open Research Commons IG and RDA International Model WG. As part of this work, we have reviewed categories used in Commons service catalogues. Click here to see a visualization based on our report.
Virtual Research Environments
This work package examines the flow of data from repositories to Virtual Research Environments (VREs), Computational Notebooks (CNs), and other analytical tools. The keystone of this work package is a landscape review on the interoperability of data sources and VREs. Two other deliverables are being pursued to complement the landscape review. First, a survey investigating how researchers use computational notebooks and VREs in their research is being conducted in collaboration with Holloway University and ELIXIR. Second, the ITO is holding an open research data competition promoting the use of WDS member data in research systems, to be announced in late spring 2022. Together, these three projects will explore the technical specifications and community standards surrounding data discovery and access, compare the needs of different research communities, and consider how these needs are reflected in the relevant research software infrastructure.