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Management & Governance is a cross-cutting element featuring policies and tools for providers, structures for decision processes and maintenance of the terms of use..in the RDC. It provides the general policies for users and providers of resources in the RDC as well as a framework for authentication, authorization and monitoring to be used for existing services.

Zooming into Management and Governance 

Policies (grey)

Services

draw.io Diagram
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IDM (green), Authentification (green), Authorisation (grey)

Service Monitoring (green)

The Research Data Commons are conceptualised as a a federated, distributed infrastructure with many contributing data and service providers. Within In the first current development phase (2022 ff.), the main resource providers are partner organisations from within the NFDI4Biodiversity consortium which , who develop specific software components according to the project´s work program, or work on pilot implementations of cloud-based services and data products.  

Based on these development developments and the NFDI4Biodiversity Use Case projects, we define the rules and regulations necessary to operate RDC in the long term. Policies serve to clarify the rules of participation, i.e. the criteria for offering of applications and data products. Inline with the NFDI philosophy, we support the provision of data according to the FAIR principles, although the providion of open data is strongly encouraged. For our service providers, we request information on the development status and sustainability of tools and encourage the use of common registries like biotools and EOSC Marketplace. 

• Outputs in preparation: Policies for data and service providers

In terms of basic services, we support the use of academic ID´s ID's for access control to all RDC services. At present, Life Science Login is supported for all existing services, allowing users to login with academic ID´s ID's from across Europe and a wide range of social media profiles. In addition, the GFBio Identity Provider is available for registration of users outside the academic system. Authorisation Authorization is presently done on the level of services, until the scope of an NFDI-wide solution is materialising.becomes clearer.

In terms of Service Monitoring, we plan to implement Another crucial component in Management & Governance is a control center where we collect usage statistics (KPIs Key Performanc Indicators (KPI) of data and services and on the long term also of users. On the one hand side, we are interested in the popularity and quality of data sets and services. On the other hand, we have to control the resource usage of users, i.e.,  is there an overuse of the RDC. The Scorpion Service is an exmple for such an service that stores and visualizes KPI measurements. The KPIs are selected to give an impression on how a service is used. In this way we want to monitor the uptake of our offerings in the community of interest. Based on previous work from the German Bioinformatics Network de.NBI, the Scorpion Service was set up to store and visualise KPIs delivered by RDC service providers. This allows to some degree the quantification of a service quality and will be depened deepened in the future by a qualitative monitoring through user surveys.

This component is essential to the entire RDC as it defines the rules for participation, i.e., which users are allowed to access which data and servivces. As FAIR data is not necessarily open (though we strive for making FAIR data and services as open as possible), the RDC has to implement access rules for users and offer usage statistics (KPI monitoring) in a control center. One of the reasons that data access has to be restricted is the management of data sets representing protected plant and animal species and access to the associated data has to be controlled for the purpose of nature conservation has to be controlled in the context of nature conservation. Another reason might be that a group of users would like to develop a high-quality data product, but are not willing to make the data sets openly available during the work progress. A prerequisite of all these services is a powerful user and role management. Thus, one essential and existing service of Management & Governance is the registration and single sign-on login for users. In long term, this should not remain a service of RDC, but being offered on the level of NFDI. While this is currently going to be collaboratively designed in a NFDI-wide working group, we developed a first implementation of such a necessary service in RDC in such a way that it will likely agree with the future services of NFDI.

One crucial component in Management & Governance is a control center where we collect usage statistics (KPIs) of data and services and on the long term also of users. On the one hand side, we are interested in the popularity and quality of data sets and services. On the other hand, we have to control the resource usage of users, i.e.,  is there an overuse of the RDC. With the Scorpion Service a service exists which stores and visualizes KPI measurements. The KPIs are selected to give an impression on how a service is used. This allows to some degree the quantification of a service quality and will be deepened in the future by a qualitative monitoring through user surveys.

Examples

Perspectives

Policies

Inline with the NFDI philosophy, we support the provision of data according to the FAIR principles. We value machine-readability and the provision of data unter CC-0 and CC-BY licences. For our service providers, we request information on the development status and sustainability of tools and encourage the use of common registries like biotools and EOSC Marketplace. 

• Outputs in preparation: Policies for data and service providers

Authorization

We work on a concept for an authorization mechanism that works across multiple RDC services. This will likely be realized through "service suites" to which individual users can sign up and that grant them certain privileges across multiple services. The authorization concept will be developed in close collaboration with the IAM4NFDI base service that will provide the required technical components.

• Outputs in preparation: Concept for the authorization mechanism to be shared with other NFDI consortia

Examples

• GFBio SSO
• Life Science Login
• Service Monitoring: Scorpion

Perspectives

• Policies