Node: ELIXIR Sweden
Authors: Elin Kronander and Niclas Jareborg, heads of data management
Topics: Context overview, Connections and gaps
Create the overview together. Mapping services in an in-person workshop can reveal connections and gaps that are difficult to identify from separate lists.
The Swedish node in ELIXIR is constituted by NBIS (National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden) which is a national research infrastructure providing bioinformatics and data science support to the Swedish life science research community. NBIS is also the bioinformatics platform for SciLifeLab, the distributed national research infrastructure for molecular biosciences in Sweden.
Within SciLifeLab, RDM services are offered by both a Data management unit in NBIS and by SciLifeLab Data Centre, which is a central function within SciLifeLab. The two functions are separate organisational entities but collaborate quite a lot to provide RDM support to Swedish life science researchers. They have different remits, but are to some extent dependent on each other for delivering these services. And even though communication works well, there were gaps in understanding the teams of what relevant services were operated or being developed by one or the other.
To tackle this, we organised a workshop to visualise the landscape of existing and emerging RDM-related services. Practically, we gathered staff from both NBIS and Data Centre that were asked to write down all services that they could think of on sticky notes. The sticky notes were colour coded based on who was the service provider and whether it was an existing or emerging service. They were then placed on a representation of the research data life cycle to visualise which parts of the life cycle the services targeted.
Figure: Swedish research data services mapped across the research data life cycle. Source: ELIXIR Sweden.
Creating this joint visual map in an in-person group setting helped establishing a shared understanding of the landscape of the available service across the two groups that we operate to be able to provide our joint support functionality.