Research Data Management

in South Africa

Anwar Vahed

July 2017

Outline

• SA investment in research data

• NICIS and DIRISA

• South African National Data

Infrastructure & Services (SANDIS)

• Figshare as data repository: Background

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• SAEON: Environmental

• HSRC: Human Sciences and Humanities

• DataFirst: Survey and administrative

• Agincourt: Social, health demographics

• SANSA: Earth observation

• SADA: Survey & related

• SAAO: Astronomy

• Govt departments: StatsSA, DWA...

• Academia & research councils Meteorology, EO, Climate Change, Water, Energy, Health…

National Data Investment

SKA projected budget

€2 billion to 2020

€650 million (Phase 1)

SA so far: R2 billion

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Core services

Networked

resources

Skills & expertise

National Integrated Cyberinfrastructure System

(NICIS)

• Amalgamated physically distributed cyber platform for e-research

• Overarching national coordination

• Priority and cross-cutting domains

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Computing Services (CHPC )

Networking Services

(SANReN)

Data Services (DIRISA)

Data intensive research environments (Cloud)

Materials & Manuf.

Energy

Earth & Environment

Phy Sci & Eng.

Humans & Society

Health, Bio & Food

DIRISA Objectives

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Robust infrastructure & services

Sustained, federated and Trusted repositories

Enabling environments (VREs/Gateways)

Sound data management

RDM policies and standards

Data sharing and reuse

Capacity & expertise

Data intensive research & management

Data Science “technologists”

Advocacy & outreach

Data sharing

Stakeholder engagement

Coordination & strategy

National data intensive research activities

Inform strategic agenda

Research Ecosystems: cross & multi disciplinary

research

Data Services: harmonised data

management

Federated Data Infrastructure: observations (models and

measurements)

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Data Lifecycle Management

PIDs: People, Objects, Activities (DONA, DataCite; ORCID)

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Tiered harvesting with Trusted Repository Certification: WDS DSA

SANDIS Services

DSubscribe

• Register as DIRISA user

DataDrop

• Deposit and store data reliably

FindGet

• Discover, download data sets

SafeShare

• Safely share data with users

DataStage

• Prepare data for processing

User documentation Help & support Core services (DMP, DOI)

Phase2: Collaborative Research Environments My data management plans My workflows My data sets and outputs My communities

Community driven

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South African National Data Infrastructure and Services (SANDIS)

Collaborators

RDA

CODATA

WDS

DCC

EUDAT

ANDS

UK D_A

Data.gov

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So far... (Current status)

• Robust infrastructure and services – Regional Tier 2 data node (Western Cape): Astronomy & Bioinformatics – Server cluster, DMP tool, DONA and DataCite Services

• Data management – Policies (Open and not Open Data): Regulatory (POPI Act), Ethical – Guidelines, SA DMP tool, User subscription

• Capacity & expertise – National MSc in eScience – Data fundamentals courses (Data & Software Carpentry; IBM)

• Advocacy & outreach – SARDA, USAf, ASSAF, NRF (OA), DHET – RDA, CODATA, WDS, SKA – IDW 2018?

• Coordination & strategy – National data intensive research strategy – SADC Cyberinfrastructure framework

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National Research Data Management

• Western Cape Regional (T2) Data Node

– Consortium: UCT, UWC, US, CPUT, Sol Plaatje, SKA

– Figshare for data management

• Research Data Management “Systems”

– Figshare; Islandora; Open Science Framework, Dataverse,…

• Figshare: User / Institutional uptake?

– 6 month pilot

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Thank you

Discussion Which is “best”?

Institutional commitment? How cost recovery?

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www.dirisa.ac.za

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