Data Description Registry Interoperability: Draft Case Statement

1. Problem Statement and Scope

In recent years there has been a significant growth of research data repositories and registries. These repositories are fragmented across institutions, countries and research domains. As such, finding and accessing research datasets are not trivial tasks for many researchers. This challenge can be addressed through two essential but distinct phases of interaction:

1. Discovery phase: it is common that researchers have to search multiple registry systems to identify the available datasets related to their research. This problem can be addressed by interoperability among registries, thus allowing researchers visibility across multiple systems.
2. Access phase: subsequently researches seek to access datasets across infrastructures and platforms. Such a cross-platform access is currently hindered by challenges including lack of interoperable identifiers, access rights, federated authentication, and data transfer infrastructure.

This working group focuses on the challenge of interoperability at the discovery phase and investigates the problem of enabling data description exchange between research data registry systems. This group aims to provide working services and pragmatic methods that enable finding datasets across multiple registry systems.

The solution to this problem is NOT envisaged to be “one uber-portal to rule them all”, but rather to compile simple enabling infrastructures based on existing open protocols and standards with a flexible and extensible approach that allows registries to opt-in and enables any third-party to create particular global views of research data.

2. Adopting Institutions

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