The main objective of the data management community is to maintain or improve the quality of the research data for verification and reuse.
Summary of Community
The roles and behaviour of the data management community can be summarized as follows:
The data manager negotiates the conditions for transferring authority from the data owner to the data manager for curating the research data. The data manager curates the research data by keeping/improving it to defined quality/standards. The data manager may send the research data to the preservation manager who will catalogue and store it into the archival information system.
The following roles are identified in the Data Management Community:
Data Management Subsystem (passive role): the community component representing the data management community as a whole.
Data Owner (active role): a person or organisation that owns the data and determines the conditions for deposit/access with the Data Manager.
Data Manager (active role): a person that is responsible for ensuring the quality of the research data during its ingest and management.
Preservation Manager (active role): a person that is responsible for generating data products, and entering/registering them in the data administration service.
Data Administration System (passive role): A system that is responsible for registering the data products for management purposes.
The following behaviour is identified in the Data Management Community:
Ingest Data, the behaviour performed by the data manager, the data owner and the data administration system whereby they negotiate a submission agreement, transfer a submission information package to the data administration system and appraise it.
Curate Data, the behaviour performed by the data manager, the preservation manager, and the data administration system, whereby the data manager check the quality of the data and removes faults. The data manager then adds meaningful documentation (metadata) to the data. The preservation manager transforms the data to a preservation format or migrates it to another platform, creates an Archival Information Package and stores it in a data administration system.
Administer Data, the behaviour performed by the data manager and the data administration System whereby the required information for data management is administered.
Communities that typically collaborate with the data management community related are: data acquisition communityfor retrieving well-documented data, data processing community for e.g. transforming data and data publishing community for making the data accessible.