Consortium Guidelines

The National Data Service (NDS) Consortium guidelines aim for a transparent, fair, and effective governance process.

NDS refers to a modular, extensible, framework for sharing and publishing research data across all disciplines of science and engineering. This data can come from individual researchers or large collaborations and projects. The data may be produced by experiments, surveys, instruments, or computer simulations, or it may represent new processing and synthesis of existing data. Such data is expected to serve as the basis for scientific results published in professional and academic journals. The NDS provides support for sharing the models and software associated with the data and its analysis.

The NDS provides essential services for finding, using, sharing, and publishing data. NDS brings together archives, libraries, federations and other data resource across many disciplines and communities. NDS builds on the standards and infrastructure for sharing data being put into place by those communities. A unifying architecture for NDS allows for numerous tools and community-specific services to plug into the NDS framework and also to extend and enhance the NDS as it grows and matures.

The NDS Consortium is an alliance of communities, projects, publishers and other stakeholders that will participate in the NDS federation. Its aims are to coordinate the efforts of the participating organizations as well as inform the development and evolution of the NDS architecture.

Participants include:

  • Interested individuals from a stake-holding organization
    • Individuals with a strong interest in engaging in the NDS launch process, but who are not prepared to speak on behalf of their organization.
  • Interested, stake-holding organizations
    • Organizations with a strong interest in engaging in the NDS launch process, but who are not prepared to signal their intent to serve as charter members.
  • Consortium launch members
    • Organizations who intend to serve as charter members in the launch of the NDS

Key types of organizations/stakeholders include, but are not limited to:

  • Citizen scientists
  • Commercial organizations
  • Cyberinfrastructure providers
  • Data centers
  • End user scientists
  • FFRDCs
  • Government agencies (international, national, state, local)
  • Initiatives centered on sharing data, models and software (including pipeline development)
  • K-12 education
  • Libraries, museums, archives
  • Professional associations
  • Scholarly publishers
  • Software developers
  • Standards setting organizations
  • Universities and colleges
Responsibilities of all participants include:
  • Transparency of information sharing
  • Constructive engagement
We consider it important to establish appropriate balances between:
  • Deliberation and action
  • Research and education
Individual contributions encouraged:
  • Active participation in meetings and workshops
  • Membership in working groups
  • Outreach for NDS at your community meetings