Warning: These documents are under active
development and subject to change (version 2.1.0-beta).
The latest release documents are at:
https://purl.dataone.org/architecture
The user requirements outlined in this document drove much of the process for identification of the DataONE Functional Use Cases described elsewhere. The functional use cases were identified and prioritized over a series of meetings funded by the NSF sponsored “Virtual Data Center” (VDC) INTEROP project.
DataONE provides the distributed framework (which is comprised of Member and Coordinating Nodes as illustrated below), sound management, and robust technologies that enable long-term preservation of diverse multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national observational data. DataONE initially emphasizes observational data collected by biological (genome to ecosystem) and environmental (atmospheric, ecological, hydrological, and oceanographic) scientists, research networks, and environmental observatories. DataONE will be domain agnostic, progressively expanding to broader domains and building on infrastructure and interoperability with DataNet partners.
DataONE is not the end, but rather the means to enable scientists and citizens to address and better understand the difficult and complex biological, environmental, social, and technological challenges affecting human, ecosystem, and planetary sustainability. The comprehensive cyber-infrastructure allows novel questions to be asked that require harnessing the enormity of existing data and developing new methods to combine and analyze diverse data resources (see figure below).
DataONE will accomplish its goals by making scientists, students, librarians, and citizens active participants in the data life cycle, especially the data preservation process. By supporting community derived interoperability standards and incorporating new value-added and innovative technologies (e.g., for semantic and geospatial information, scientific workflows, and advanced visualization) into the scientific process, DataONE will facilitate sophisticated data integration, analysis, interpretation, and understanding. A strong education and outreach program focuses on scientists and students learning to better and more easily manage, preserve, analyze, and visualize Earth observational data. Citizen scientists are actively engaged in data preservation and scientific discovery through their involvement in programs such as the USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) and numerous Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology citizen science efforts (e.g., eBird, Project FeederWatch).
The DataONE architecture must embrace the highly dispersed and independent nature of data collection activities relevant to the environmental and earth sciences. Data are collected by tens of thousands of scientists around the world who have the expertise to describe and archive these data, as well as curate them. Attempting to centralize this curation function is inherently untenable and will not scale. Thus, DataONE will achieve both scalability and sustainability through a highly distributed system architecture (Figures from “Core Architecture” and below) that utilizes the DataONE Service Interface to access uniform services provided and used by three types of cyber-infrastructure: (1) Member Nodes located at institutions distributed throughout academia, libraries, government agencies, and other organizations that provide local data storage, curation, and metadata for a set of data resources that are collected or affiliated with that institution; (2) Coordinating Nodes that are geographically-distributed to provide a high-availability, fault-tolerant, and scalable set of coordinating services to the Member Nodes, including a complete metadata index and data replication services for all data in all Member Nodes; and (3) an Investigator Toolkit that provides a complete and evolving set of tools for data and metadata management by scientists and curators throughout the entire data life cycle (Figure 3). Initially, there will be three Coordinating Nodes geographically dispersed at ORC, UNM, and UCSB. A small number of additional Coordinating Nodes may be implemented as DataNetONE expands in scope, sustainable funding, and international presence.
Invasive species are:
The outcome is suboptimal consideration of potential biotic risks associated with imports of new products, packing, shipping methods or products from new regions.
DataONE eliminates confusion related to information access and integration, providing domain relevant knowledge to researchers, border agents and to inform policy makers on potential impact or savings associated with new or ongoing trade relationships.
Specifically, DataONE addresses: