Software Engineering has a Cost! A Shared Open-Source Customizable Codebase for Scientific Data Management

Sharing and reusing diverse collections of data is essential to scientific discoveries in many domains, in particular where data and tools must span multiple domains. To support these needs effectively new methods are required that simplify the amount of effort needed by researchers to find and utilize data, support community accepted data practices, and bring together the breadth of standards, tools, and resources utilized by a community. Clowder addresses these challenges by distributing the data curation overhead throughout the lifecycle of the data, interacting with and utilizing a variety of community tools, while also supporting different data governance and ownership requirements. The effort will transition and expand the grassroots Clowder user community into a distributed and organized open source community, governed by the stakeholders, providing a long term sustainable software resource supporting convergent research data needs.