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Platform Development and Operation
WP3 was led by Vasily Bunakov. This work package established the technical platform which provides the underpinning infrastructure and tools that support the initial and future pathfinders. This included provision of catalogues and repositories for data, and support for community creation of standards, ontologies, protocols and APIs. The platform will support access to scalable data storage and transfer systems, cloud services, etc. and will adopt access control mechanisms that give sufficient flexibility to enable content to be maintained.
This work package worked closely with other work packages to engage with the community on their technology requirements. The work package has three principal activities.
- Establishment and operation of the base platform. This activity established a data and compute environment to deliver PSDI services including a user management system and processes and tools to support systems operations. It deployed software development tools such as Atlassian suite and GitHub, and an agile software development process for the PSDI development team.
- Development of Data Infrastructure tools. This activity provided the data infrastructure tools required by the pathfinders, deploying existing software packages where appropriate and developing bespoke software only where this provides the most effective long-term solution. These include a PSDI portal; FAIR data repositories; cross searching and data discovery tools; and tools supporting data generation pipelines such as data catalogues, provenance recording, electronic laboratory notebooks, and generation of packages of research outputs. Tools for orchestration of computational workflows facilitating access to computing resources, and coordinating workflows for complex simulation and data analysis pipelines would also be provided.
- Centre of Expertise in tools technology, standards, methods, community recommendations. The team providing the above activities also acted as a basis for a centre of expertise offering advice and support to the community on best practises and tools. They worked with the training and outreach programme delivered through Work package 2, as well as directly with the Pathfinder activities, to ensure best practices are adopted and wheels are not reinvented, etc. This included contributing to the development of information resources.