Description
Community Data Collections is a research data curation platform developed as part of the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI), built on InvenioRDM and deployed on Kubernetes. It provides a flexible, standards based home for domain specific research data communities, each with tailored metadata schemas, deposit forms, and curation workflows, while ensuring that data across the platform remains Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).
The platform now supports 10 active communities, hosting several thousand curated records across the physical sciences. Recent work has focused on Domain Specific Metadata (DSMD) schemas, including AI ready datasets, simulation databases, and benchmark collections, each with custom fields, validation, and display templates, allowing communities to describe data with discipline appropriate rigour while remaining interoperable at the platform level.
Structured metadata and standardised record schemas ensure that every deposited dataset is findable through search and indexing, and accessible through open, well documented interfaces. Interoperability is achieved by aligning community specific schemas with shared underlying data models, so that records from different disciplines can be discovered, compared, and combined using common tooling. Reusability is supported through clear licensing, versioning, and rich contextual metadata that allows researchers to understand and trust data long after it was first deposited.
By embedding FAIR principles directly into the platform’s architecture rather than treating them as an afterthought, Community Data Collections aims to lower the barrier to good data stewardship for individual research communities, while building a coherent, discoverable body of curated data across the physical sciences.