Sloan Foundation backs new data infrastructure effort

"The Data Conservancy, IEEE, and Portico announced today their partnership to design and prototype a data curation infrastructure that connects published research and associated data sets for the long-term benefit of researchers worldwide. This two-year project, which is supported by a $602,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will result in the development of a service that will build, store, update, and retrieve the connections among publications and data, and preserve those connections over the long-term. Scholarly digital publications increasingly consist of distinct building blocks, including text, graphics, and data, which often reside in different repositories and are maintained by different institutions, employing different technologies. These components have many, and evolving, relationships that must be preserved over time. This project will make it possible to preserve not just these publications and their underlying data, but the complex relationships among them, thereby supporting the continual development of scholarly communication and digital publishing. A publisher who wants to know if there are reference links to data for a publication, for example, submits article metadata and identifiers to the service, which returns any relationships it finds, thus making it possible to track and preserve these connections through the scholarly communications cycle ..."