National Data Platform Pilot: Services for Equitable Open Access to Data

The scientific community generates vast amounts of data through research, experiments, and observations. Effective management of this data to support equitable discovery, access, analysis, communication, and sharing is critical for research, innovation, and science-driven decision making. Furthermore, broad and equitable access to diverse artificial intelligence (AI)-ready data repositories is crucial to realize the full potential of AI in responsibly advancing solutions to important scientific and societal problems at national and global scale. In response to these immediate needs, the National Data Platform (NDP) serves as a federated and extensible data ecosystem that fosters collaboration, innovation, and equitable data use, leveraging existing national Cyberinfrastructure capabilities. Connecting distributed computing and data CI systems to provide open access to data from disparate, often siloed repositories and other data sources necessitates a standardized process and services for ingestion, indexing, curation and data analysis. Through a “removing-the-barriers”' approach to democratizing data, NDP combines needs assessment, co-design, and diversity-aware capacity building with ready-for-scale data CI capabilities, offering data and knowledge management services across the national CI ecosystem. As a national hub of interconnected data hubs, NDP facilitates data discovery and usage, drives responsible AI research and development, fosters scientific understanding, and supports decision-making, policy formation and societal impact. NDP focuses on several case studies in climate and related research areas to evolve data-centric workflows, including wildland fire, and natural and real-time hazards detection and decision making This effort is also supported by National Discovery Cloud for Climate (NDC-C) resources. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.