Speaker
Dr
Doris Bambey
(DIPF)
Description
The current research data infrastructure for social and educational research in Germany is highly diversified. Over the last ten years, various domain-specific repositories have been established and more and more institutional repositories have come into play. Existing repositories differ in various aspects, such as to topical scope, types of data, range of services and the scientific communities they address. This decentralization of infrastructures can also be observed in other disciplines and is dysfunctional from a researcher’s perspective because data become more difficult accessible for secondary use. Users have to identify relevant data services and are confronted with different service levels or qualities, varying curation and preservation strategies as well as with a diverse range of technical, institutional, legal and regulatory settings.
To overcome these barriers and to optimize the use of existing data the project Verbund Forschungsdaten Bildung (Verbund FDB) - a German network for educational research data (funded by the German ministry of research) – aims at establishing a federated infrastructure for research data offering harmonized support services to generate and manage FAIR data on the basis of common standards and procedures. The primary objective of the project is that fragmented infrastructures become interoperable and provide common and user-friendly services for researchers doing secondary analyses. The project is based on a collaboration of three established data centers. In the first step, the project focused on harmonizing metadata schemes, standardizing ingest and curation procedures between the participating data centers for offering joint data archiving services and advancing the comprehensibility as well as quality and visibility of studies and data within the field.
The second step (2016-2019) aims at broadening the network of participating data centers in educational science and adjacent disciplines. In order to adhere to the diverse settings of these partner institutions, a model of varying degrees and forms of cooperation is projected by the Verbund FDB. Our paper presents the architecture for a federated data infrastructure designed to facilitate the secondary use of existing data and to improve the user experience when searching for research data. We will present the state of the art in the educational data landscape and discuss our concept of a federated infrastructure. We will highlight challenges, opportunities and risks in federating decentralized and fragmented data infrastructures.
| Topic Area | The EOSC & EDI building blocks |
|---|---|
| Type of abstract | Presentation (15 minutes) |
Primary author
Dr
Doris Bambey
(DIPF)
Co-authors
Ms
Alexia Meyermann
(DIPF)
Dr
Malte Jansen
(IQB)
Dr
Pascal Siegers
(GESIS)
Mr
Reiner Mauer
(GESIS)
