E-INFRASTRUCTURE AND DATA MANAGEMENT IN SUPPORT OF GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH

An 18-month long process involving ~120 experts in domain, computer, and social sciences from more than a dozen countries has resulted in a formal set of recommendations to the Belmont Forum, an international group of the leading national science funding agencies and others, on how to develop a global e-infrastructure in support of global change research, including:

• adoption of data principles that promote a global, interoperable e-infrastructure
• establishment of information and data officers for coordination of global data management and e-infrastructure efforts
• promotion of effective data planning
• determination of best practices
• development of a cross-disciplinary training curriculum on data and model analysis, management and curation

An e-infrastructure that supports data-intensive, multidisciplinary research is needed to accelerate the pace of science to address 21st century global change challenges. Data discovery, access, sharing and interoperability collectively form core elements of an emerging shared vision of e-infrastructure for scientific discovery. The pace and breadth of change in information management across the data lifecycle means that no one country or institution can unilaterally provide the leadership and resources required to use data and information effectively, or needed to support a coordinated, global e-infrastructure.

The Belmont Forum is ideally poised to play a vital and transformative leadership role in establishing a sustained human and technical international e-infrastructure to support global change research. The international collaborative process that went into forming these recommendations is contributing to national governments and funding agencies and international bodies working together to execute them.