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PSDI Pilot Activities
PSDI pilot phase, was funded from the EPSRC Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) programme, and ran from November 2021 – March 2022, following on from the large infrastructures SoN submitted by our project team. This pilot phase was a rapid scoping exercise, designed to expand on the ambitions of the project from the SoN, to engage broadly with the potential user community to gather and analyse requirements and to develop a plan for future phases.
Specifically, the objectives of the pilot were:
- Engage with the potential PSDI stakeholder community and build support for its creation
- Undertake some case studies to demonstrate the potential scientific benefits
- Trial some relevant technologies and investigate their interoperability
- Gather requirements arising from the case studies and trials and wider consultation
- Analyse these requirements, elucidate the necessary functionality, and propose a technology architecture for PSDI
- Produce a detailed plan for future phases of PSDI
- Create a governance structure for future activities
Pilot Report
The PSDI Pilot phase produced an overall high level report which summarised the activities that were carried out in the Pilot, as well as the recommendations and outlines for the future of PSDI.
Work Packages
The pilot activity was split into four work packages, outlined below, to capture the different elements of the pilot activities. These WPs worked across the pillars to engage with different scales of data infrastructure and disciplinary areas to solicit a broad spectrum of requirements. However, there was collaboration between the different work packages due to the connected nature of the project and the activities in separate WPs fed into deliverables and outputs of others. You can find out more about each of the work packages on their individual pages.
WP1. Coordination, Governance and Strategy
WP1 directed the PSDI pilot project and developed the governance framework for later phases. It also collated results of the other WPs to produce a strategy and plan for PSDI going forward.
WP2. Stakeholder Engagement
Community involvement was crucial to evaluating the potential of PSDI. A program of events and workshops were run to engage with as many identified stakeholders as possible. These engaged communities on both a group and individual level to elicit requirements that also fed into the other work packages.
WP3. Architecture & Technology
WP3 explored and evaluated technology options and architecture designs for the PSDI underlying infrastructure. This also included undertaking small scale technology trials evaluating usability, scalability, security and interaction with other technologies.
WP4. Case studies
Working with some of the key stakeholders identified earlier in this document we undertook case studies that scoped out or created prototype systems to demonstrate how proposed elements of PSDI could influence cutting-edge research. We also established a library of further use cases across our four pillars.