- Vision
- Project Outline
- Implementation
The infrastructure for scientific discovery that is driving global innovation is outdated and failing.
There is a high entry barrier to participate in the scientific discovery process. We are missing out on a large amount of human potential to address the global challenges we face today.
We want to democratise and enable global access to knowledge by making scientific data universally discoverable, verifiable and reusable to anyone, anywhere in the world.
To make this happen we are developing a data management tool that fits into the researcher's workflow while ensuring the scientific discovery process is accessible to everybody. Our vision is to create real time verification of scientific ‘truth’ and to foster universal collaboration.
In essence, we want to bring science into the age of connectivity, the age of internet.
Our platform will be built on top of both IPFS[1] and DAT[2] with a view to demonstrating how distributed technologies and approaches can integrate with and complement existing research infrastructures and projects, with a view to dramatically reducing the overall cost of research data management.
We propose a solution for scientific data management and exchange that permits for the first time the deployment of scientific data in an independent way and seamlessly to track its dissemination, validation and utilization. All interactions will be registered on a public blockchain. This will fundamentally change the way scientists communicate and collaborate with each other.
The service will be driven by three innovative technologies:
Firstly, all users share data via a content addressed storage system based on the InterPlanetary File System[1]. Through a collaborative network of trusted nodes, this will insure open and permanent access to fundamental primary research data and analysis. [3]
Secondly, all interactions with the data are tracked on a public blockchain. This allows contributions to be attributable and to trace the impact of individual contributions directly to the hub without the need for a third party trusted intermediary. [3]
Thirdly, smart contracts between scientists introduces a simplified way of governance of the research cycle. Smart contracts will be easily established within the app and will lay out the terms of such collaboration, will incentivize contributions to projects and may become a new means of funding research through a tokenized science economy. [4]
We envision that our solution will present one of the first open source tools for everyone to access a distributed web of scientific knowledge. A tokenized research economy will enable team-based collaborations in different scientific fields to an unprecedented degree. [4] Our solution can be seen as a visionary, science specific browser for a “crypto economy” of science.
Work with existing data packaging initiatives to agree a set of supported wrapper formats which address different levels of semantic interoperability, e.g. “discoverability metadata” for the package as a whole roughly equivalent to DataCite Schema (e.g. DataPackages/DataCate/ResearchObjects); detailed file-level annotations (e.g. DataPackages/DataCrate/ResearchObjects); data-element level annotations/metadata (e.g. ResearchObjects/TabularDataPackages).
Establish a governance and social framework whereby a consortium of “reliable” entities would undertake to replicate data across a cluster, i.e. similar to LOCKSS but adding distributed peer-to-peer technology.
Establish UX and workflow whereby individual researchers can identify themselves to the consortium/network and request that their data be pinned/replicated. This to include automated verification of agreed minimum requirements around data packaging formats.
Ditto for existing research data repositories.
Establish a search service which can surface pinned data packages (indexing the metadata directly from the packages themselves).
[2]https://github.com/datproject