A Federated Architecture for a National Data Library

In response to the UK National Data Library: Technical White Paper Challenge put forward by Wellcome and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), DARE UK submitted a white paper outlining a technical vision and architecture that could be adopted by a future National Data Library, for the benefit of the research community and the UK population.It describes the key elements necessary and sufficient to create the foundational technical infrastructure for a federated National Data Library. From the perspective of a public sector data provider, the architecture offers three key capabilities: it creates a network of trustworthy services which have agreed to operate with a shared security posture, answering the question “is the IT safe enough for me to share data with it?” it creates a community of operators around a single set of technologies at the infrastructure level, reducing the complexities of data sharing and increasing the pool of expertise available, answering the question “who can help me do this more easily?” it provides an authoritative point of truth for services, data assets, users and projects, answering the question “how can I tell whether my data are being used for the purposes I’ve approved, and by whom?” To realise the value of sensitive public data inside Britain’s existing “safe data libraries” and secure “reading rooms”, “do nothing” is not an option. To build everything from scratch would be expensive and risky, and result in an immature product in an environment requiring mature security. The work of DARE UK – led by our partners, collaborators, contributors and communities - has delivered and is delivering many of the components for a federated NDL for research.