Building a Disciplinary, World-Wide Data Infrastructure

TL;DR

This paper examines how various scientific disciplines organize data sharing infrastructure at the international level, highlighting commonalities, differences, and key success factors for building interoperable, discipline-specific data systems.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of disciplinary data infrastructures across multiple fields, identifying shared principles and challenges in establishing effective data sharing frameworks.

Findings

Data sharing should be driven by scientific needs

Disciplinary standards are essential but difficult to define

Social factors pose greater challenges than technological ones

Abstract

Sharing scientific data, with the objective of making it fully discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, usable, and interoperable, requires work at the disciplinary level to define in particular how the data should be formatted and described. Each discipline has its own organization and history as a starting point, and this paper explores the way a range of disciplines, namely materials science, crystallography, astronomy, earth sciences, humanities and linguistics get organized at the international level to tackle this question. In each case, the disciplinary culture with respect to data sharing, science drivers, organization and lessons learnt are briefly described, as well as the elements of the specific data infrastructure which are or could be shared with others. Commonalities and differences are assessed. Common key elements for success are identified: data sharing should be science driven; defining the disciplinary part of the interdisciplinary standards is mandatory but challenging; sharing of applications should accompany data sharing. Incentives such as journal and funding agency requirements are also similar. For all, it also appears that social aspects are more challenging than technological ones. Governance is more diverse, and linked to the discipline organization. CODATA, the RDA and the WDS can facilitate the establishment of disciplinary interoperability frameworks. Being problem-driven is also a key factor of success for building bridges to enable interdisciplinary research.