VOSS: Virtual Standards Development Organizations: Enhancing Interoperability in Data-Intensive Science

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

The success of large-scale data-enabled scientific collaboration depends upon the development of high-quality, useful and usable standards to enable data sharing and reuse. While interdisciplinary collaborations continue to proliferate, the process of community standards development for data and metadata remains a bottleneck in cyberinfrastructure development. Community-based standards development virtual organizations are vitally important for the success of cyberinfrastructure, but little is known about the negotiations and instantiations of data standards within these organizations. This project will undertake a three-year qualitative study of open-participation community standards organizations in the genomic sciences to investigate how they manage diverse stakeholder interests to develop and deploy community standards. Large-scale scientific collaboration is necessary to answer complex research questions that are crucial for national policy-making and scientific progress. Significant investments are being made in building cyberinfrastructure that uses advanced computational resources to support collaborative science. The success of these cyberinfrastructures depends upon the development of high-quality, useful and usable standards to enable data sharing and reuse. This project will provide guidance in effective standards development processes to the genomics field and others with similar data sharing requirements.