The objective of the data creation community is to collect the research data using specific instruments and methodologies.
The roles and behaviour to achieve this objective can be summarized as follows:
The data creator commissions the research data to be collected. The principal investigator commissions a designer to design, implement, configure, calibrate and maintain an instrument (like a survey). The instrument is used by the data collector to record observations and aggregate these into a dataset. The data curator documents the dataset and deposits it into an archive.
The following roles are identified in the Data Creation Community:
Data Creation Subsystem (passive role): the community component that represents the data creation community as a whole.
Data Creator (active role): a person or organisation that is responsible for the data creation.
Instrument Designer (active role): a person who builds, maintains and configures and an Instrument used for data collection.
Instrument (passive role): a system and/or methodology used by the Data Collector that record observations.
Data Collector (active role): a person who records observations using the Instrument and registers these into a dataset.
The following behaviours are identified as part of the data creation community:
Deploy Instrument, the behaviour of the data creation subsystem performed by the data creator, the designer and the instrument, whereby an instrument is requested, build, instantiated and deployed.
Collect Data, the behaviour of the data creation subsystem performed by the collector and the instrument whereby the data collector records and aggregates observations from the instrument into a dataset.
Communities that typically collaborate with the data creation community are: data curation community for documenting the collected data, data provision community for providing access within/without the creation community and data processing community for e.g. cleaning the data.