The main objective of the data provision community is to make the research data discoverable and accessible for researchers (and potentially a wider audience such as the public).
Summary Behaviour
The roles and behaviour of the data management community can be summarized as follows:
The data provider publishes the data for potential data consumers. Data consumers can then discover the published data using the data discovery system and/or access the published data using the data retrieval system.
The following roles are identified in the data provisioning community:
Data Provision Subsystem: the community component representing the data provision community.
Data Provider (active role): a person or organization that is responsible for making the research data from the data owner available for the data consumer.
Data Discovery System (passive role): a system facilitating discovery of research data and its context.
Data Retrieval System (passive role): a system that enables retrieval of research data. Data retrieval includes access control (and thus, authorization).
Data Consumer (passive/active role): an agent that requests and receives the research data (for further use). Access to the data may be direct, or mediated via a third-party.
The following behaviour is identified in the Data Provision Community:
Data Publication: A behaviour by the data provider, the Data Discovery System and the Data Retrieval System for making data for making research data discoverable and accessible.
Data Discovery: A behaviour by a data consumer and the Data Retrieval System whereby the data consumer uses the Data Retrieval System to discover data of interest.
Data Retrieval: A behaviour by the Data Consumer and the Data Retrieval System whereby the Data Consumer request data or metadata and the Data Retrieval System responds, after successful authorization,with the requested metadata and/or data. The metadata may be used for referral.
Communities that typically collaborate with the data provision community related are: data management community for improving metadata for discovery, data processing community for harmonisation or just-in-time conversion during access, data identification community for global identification or referral, user authentication community for global authentication of data consumers and data creation community for capturing enrichments to the provisioned data.