Data, information and technology services for research and management of science

Abstract

Science in inherently connected with data. Data are a crucial entity during whole life cycle of research activities: they are inevitable as an input to research, they are produced as a research output — which serve as an input for further research, they are present in the analyzing and evaluation of the research etc. Nowadays, data science offers new possibilities of storing, sharing, analyzing and processing huge amount of data and to generate, derive new, more accurate and more complex information about all research areas. In the past and still today sharing of scientific data was a real bottleneck. Concept of open data and new IT technology development such as cloud, next generation networks etc. offer possible solutions of this problem. In this contribution we discuss and suggest an architecture for implementation of an ecosystem of storing, sharing, analyzing and processing of research data including data for management of science. The architecture supposes sharing of data not only using a central storage, but it is understood as a bridge or an “open market” of scientific and research data, dealing with issues such as reusability, durability, possible use in the future — storing a snapshot of today world for future generation of researchers in a decentralized way. A crucial issue, which is enabled by new technologies is quality and high accessibility of data, which enables to speed up the research process. The architecture also covers social and economic concepts to ensure the sustainability of the whole research ecosystem, which we consider as a necessary condition of the realization of open data concept. As a use case, we will show an outlook of the ecosystem for research and management of science in Slovakia. The use case includes further development of systems for storing of research and scientific data running at CVTI, Slovak Center of Scientific and Technical Information.