Enterprise Viewpoint

This chapter starts with an explanation of the viewpoint, its language and its construction. Then it will describe the SSH data infrastructure community and its sub-communities.

About the viewpoint and its language

The enterprise viewpoint is “a viewpoint on an ODP system and its environment that focuses on the purpose, scope and policies for that system” [ISO 10743-3]. The enterprise viewpoint describes interrelated communities as this allows common purposes and policies within the system to be grouped. These communities are described by community contracts which contain the objectives, roles, policies, behaviour and enterprise object types of a community. The language is described by [ISO/IEC 15414].

Modelling approach

Communities have been formed by identifying and collecting functions from the documentation of existing infrastructures. These functions were filtered to those that provide direct value to the users of the data infrastructure. The remaining functions were transformed into roles and behaviour and split into communities with equal objectives.

A result of the filtering is that some functions like ‘register persistent identifier’ are not part of the enterprise viewpoint. This viewpoint does identify them, as they will be expected by many users of the reference model, but will not describe them.

The grouping into behaviour may also rise confusion as they do not intend to reflect a group of people working together as a department or as a project group, but rather as a virtual group of people having the same role. As such, when considering a group of people that creates data using a survey, only those involved defining and running the survey are considered part of the data creation community. Those documenting the survey are part of the data management community and those harmonising the questions may be part of the processing community.

This way of grouping behaviour is important as they allow the development of targeted policy for those communities and behaviours.

SSH Data Infrastructure Community

The objective of the SSH Research Data Infrastructure is to support all data related activities by providing data services.

The SSH Research Data Infrastructure operates within the SSH research infrastructure community. The SSH research community is composed of researchers and research institutes that conduct SSH research. The activities of SSH research can be characterized by research lifecycles, typically composed of the creation of ideas, formulating research questions, proposing/planning the research, conducting the research and publishing the research outcomes.

The SSH Data Infrastructure is composed of the following communities:

• Data Creation Community, who gather data from deployed instruments.

• Data Management Community, who ingest, administer and curate data.

• Data Provision Community, who provide discovery of, and access to data.

• Data Processing Community, who generate processed data from deployed processes.

• Data Identification Community, who provide resolution of identifiers for research data;

• User Authentication Community, who provide federated authentication services for users;

The data identification and the user authentication are no real enterprise communities. The identification of research data is considered as part of data management, and resolving the location of research data is considered a transparency within the enterprise viewpoint, and should thus not be visible. The same holds for user authentication.

Overview of the communities, their objectives, roles and behaviour.

SSH Research Infrastructure Community

Other communities that provide services within the SSH research community, but are not part of the data infrastructure community are:

• Research Community, who perform research. They interact with the data infrastructure community when data is required for answering research questions.

• Funder Community, who fund research. They interact with the data infrastructure community when requirements are set regarding the (long-term) availability of research data.

• Outreach, Training & Support Community, who provide community services to the SSH research community. They interact with the data infrastructure community for developing standards or for providing training for or about the data infrastructure community.

• Publishing Community, who review and publish research outcomes. They interact with the data infrastructure community when publications include or reference data.

Figure X shows how the Data Infrastructure Community relates to the other communities.

SSH Data Infrastructure Community, its Data Infrastructure

Community and other communities