Management & Governance is a cross-cutting element 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 

The Research Data Commons are conceptualised as a federated, distributed infrastructure with many contributing data and service providers. In the current development phase (2022 ff.), the main resource providers are partner organisations from within the NFDI4Biodiversity consortium, 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 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. 

In terms of basic services, we support the use of academic 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 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. Authorization is presently done on the level of services, until the scope of an NFDI-wide solution becomes clearer.

In terms of Service Monitoring, we plan to implement a control center where we collect Key Performanc Indicators (KPI) of data and services. 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 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