BELMONT FORUM E-INFRASTRUCTURES
AND DATA MANAGEMENT PROJECT
Updates and Next Steps to Deliver the final Community
Strategy and Implementation Plan
Lee Allison and Robert Gurney, Co-Chairs
US Delegation Call on November 6, 2014
Agenda
1. Interim Report
1. Process – how did we get here?
2. Conclusions and Recommendations
2. Belmont Forum feedback
3. Addressing the deliverables and timeline
4. Discussion and Questions
E-Infrastructures and Data Management Project:
• Address Belmont Challenge priorities
• Leverage’ existing investments through international added value
• Bring together new partnerships of natural scientists, social scientists, and users
• Improve how funding agencies collaborate with each other and develop new opportunities
for research
Interim Report
September 2014
 Progress Report
 Preview of emerging findings, conclusions,
recommendations
 Short-term recommendations that the Belmont
Forum should consider implementing in 2015
 All WP contributions were included; mature
recommendations were synthesized in report body
 Assessment of what needs to be done to deliver the
final Community Strategy and Implementation Plan
Road to the Interim Report (1)
WP Themes
WP Activities
February 2014 – August
2014
Data stewardship, including data management
plans (1, 4, 6), Legal (4, 6), funding scientific
research (4), Open Data (5), Exemplars/case
studies (2, 3), Governance (6), Security (6),
Education (6)
August 2014
Road to the Interim Report (2)
Steering Committee Mtg
Cross-Cutting Recommendation Themes
1. Communication, collaboration, and coordination
2. Mapping the cyberinfrastructure “landscape” in the short and long-term
3. Active data management and stewardship principles or requirements
4. Funding of research infrastructure
5. Funding of scientific research, including proposal requirements and evaluation
6. Security issues
7. Knowledge transfer and development schema
8. Legal issues
Paris, August 2014
Road to the Interim Report (3)
Secretariat Writing
Session
Outcomes >> 4 crosscutting near-term
recommendations
NSF Headquarters, Washington
DC, September 2014
Steering
Committee
& WP
Review
September 2014
Delivered
to the BF;
BF Annual
Meeting
September 22;
October 8-10
2014
Interim Report: Contents
 Actions that produce quick wins leading to recognizable results
 Strategic leverage points that make a large impact with little
funding or policy changes
 Analysis of funding mechanisms that best sustain einfrastructures
 Strategic community-building initiatives around data
infrastructures
 Process to engage the Belmont Forum in the co-design of future
CRAs to keep pace with changing global e-infrastructure
landscape
Findings and Emerging Conclusions
 Coordination of data and information is universally recognized as essential for global
environmental research
 Much agreement, consistency, commonality, convergence across the Work Packages
 Funding e-Infrastructure is very different from funding research
 Necessary to address cultural, organizational, and social obstacles in tandem with technical
challenges
 High Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) and Data Intensive Analysis Infrastructure
(DIAI) need to be considered together for both to be effective and create usable and actionable
information for science and society
 More international Collaboration, Coordination, and Communication is needed
 More Training, Knowledge Transfer and co-Development between computer science and
environmental science is needed
Findings and Emerging Conclusions
 There is a role and need for the Belmont Forum to:
 Foster good practice on sharing data in the scientific community
 Solicit, prioritize and develop use cases/exemplars that employ userdriven approaches that bring together environmental scientists,
computer scientists, and data centers
 Design and implement short courses to start to bridge skills gaps and
promote best practices between HPCI and DIAI communities, and
environmental sciences more generally
 Support and fund activities that increase awareness of data security
and legal issues
Near-Term Recommendations
1. Establish e-Infrastructure Community Social Elements
and Coordination
2. Create Working Groups and Promote Training
Activities
3. Foster Active Data Management and Stewardship
Principles
4. Provide Support for the Development of Case Studies
and Exemplars
1. Establish E-infrastructure Community
Social Elements and Coordination
 Build a coordinated network of contributors that will:
 Continue to map the dynamic landscape of interoperability, architecture, organizational
efforts and expertise
 Increase communication across global e-infrastructure efforts
 Identify people, projects, programs, organizations working toward interoperability in
science informatics, and the specific roles they play
 Establish (or support existing) capabilities to:
 Develop reference frameworks for legal and security issues around data
 Formulate specific plans for training
 Coordinate both between these efforts and with worldwide efforts in e-infrastructure
 Support legal, security and training working groups (proposed)
2. Create Working Groups and
Promote Training Activities
 Establish Legal, Security and Training working groups
 Coordinate national activities by Belmont Forum members
 Deliverables:
 Legal and Security
 Legal Guide and Compendium Draft
 Data Security Guide and Compendium Draft
 Training
 Mechanisms for recognition of training agreed with relevant professional bodies
 Exemplar summer schools and online courses
 Criteria for programs or short courses to be adopted by the Belmont Forum
3. Foster Active Data Management
and Stewardship Principles
 BF-funded research projects are required to:
 Create and implement Data Management Plans (DMPs)
 BF monitors and evaluates DMP implementation; factor in future BF funding
 Identify additional DMP costs
 Funders could provide infrastructure including data repositories to reduce overall data management costs
 Make datasets publicly available by default
 Restricting access requires appropriate justifications
 Place datasets into trusted data repositories with appropriate metadata
 Datasets are given data quality indicators
 Make data interoperable and accessible
 Comply with minimum standards for international programs, such as Future Earth, to ensure
usability and compliance across disciplines and activities internationally
 Individual BF members should adopt, monitor, and evaluate the
implementation of a harmonized DMP template
4. Provide Support for the Development
of Case Studies and Exemplars
 Invite proposals for Case Studies or Exemplars that
demonstrate to researchers and infrastructure experts
best practices:
 Research projects under Future Earth to test data management policy
recommendations
 Research projects as a tool for determining benefits of crossdisciplinary approaches by the users of harmonized e-infrastructure
 Where appropriate, these funding calls could focus on HPCI and infrastructure, ensuring they are
harmonized and enable stakeholders to work through end-to-end cooperation
Belmont Forum Feedback on Interim Report
2014 Annual Meeting, Beijing, China
 Report accepted and strongly endorsed by the BF
 Go-ahead to continue refining our findings and recommendations
 BF will decide on taking actions based on the final Community Strategy &
Implementation Plan (CSIP)
 Final CSIP may be the first official Belmont Forum deliverable
 May result in greater global recognition of our work
 Our work may influence future BF funding calls
 More collaborative than competitive funding calls
 Impressed by level of international collaboration
Belmont Forum Feedback
Guidance for the final CSIP
 Focus around how findings promote reproducible science
 Make explicit the goals, deliverables and participants in
proposed legal, security and training working groups
 Outline broader impacts for each recommendation
 What difference can the BF can make by acting on recommendations?
 How will scientists and the BF be able to do things that they couldn’t do
before?
 What are the consequences of not carrying out a recommendation?
Belmont Forum Feedback
Guidance for the final CSIP (cont.)
 Focus on recommendations that best leverage the BF
process
 Recommendations that are unique or best carried out by the BF that
might be difficult or impossible to carry out any other way
 Make sure WPs contribute to a single final CSIP, with
agreed and evidenced recommendations supported by
each of the WP deliverables
 Recommend increased cross-WP participation
Revised Timeline
 November 2014: WPs re-start work
 December 13-14: Steering Committee (SC) Meeting at AGU Fall
Meeting
 January – March 2015: WPs continue work
 April 3, 2015: Draft WP reports due
 Mid-April 2015: SC Meeting, Secretariat writing session of draft CSIP
 May 25 - July 3: Assembly and BF review of draft CSIP
 July 2014: Final SC and BF review of draft CSIP
 Week of August 3: Final CSIP due
Proposed WP Changes
In response to BF feedback
 WP1: Model data management plans; model ways of publishing
models as well as data. Work closely with WP4.
 WP2 & WP3: Work together to select/develop exemplars
 WP4: Best practices for determining/establishing trusted data repositories, implementation of
data quality indicators publishing data journals, Digital Object Identifiers. Work closely with WP1.
 Legal task group
 WP5: Open Data Survey – results can inform all WPs
 WP6: Training and security work groups, governance, best practices
for funding research vs. funding research infrastructure
 Work with the GPC and with all WPs
New Knowledge Hub
www.bfe-inf.org
Interim Report is
available online
Additional Information
Community Strategy and Implementation Plan
Mid-2015
 Vision that clearly expresses global e-infrastructure
needs, barriers and gaps
 Identify strategic science policies, outlining what can
be done better, in a multilateral way, to support
global change research
 Informs stakeholders
 Prioritizes action to address the interoperability challenges
 Integrates existing national and international research in order
to promote more holistic environmental support system