The CFDE was formed In April 2019, and has two main components. The engagement team, headed by C. Titus Brown, serves as the point of first contact with DCCs, and provides ongoing engagement between the DCCs, the Common Fund, and the CFDE technical team, as well as public outreach. The engagement team is also providing DCCs with some training and outreach resources. The technical team is a cross-institution collaboration between the teams of Owen White at the University of Maryland, Ian Foster at the University of Chicago, Carl Kesselman from the Information Sciences Institute, Avi Ma’ayan from the Icahn School of Medicine and Susanna-Assunta Sansone from the Oxford e-Research Centre. Additionally, the University of Maryland team provides overall project management of the technical team.
At the inception of the CFDE, the technical team proposed to create a number of tools and interfaces to support cross-DCC search and ecosystem integration. These included a data dashboard, which would monitor DCC data upload to the cloud as well as usage statistics; a unified portal for searching across DCC metadata; a metadata model to facilitate the search portal; and tools to support harmonization, FAIRness assessment, data staging and pipeline sharing. These deliverables are outlined in Appendix G.
Throughout the engagement process, we presented these proposed technical products and solicited DCC input on their usefulness, and feasibility. While several of our technical deliverables are continuing in their original form, others have shifted in scope and focus in response to the needs and concerns expressed by the DCCs. The activities described in Recommendation 3, below, are the result of these changing priorities.