Session: 16-03-04: Foundational Framework II

Paper Number: 173873

Am-Bench Infrastructure, Informatics, and the Configurable Data Curation System (Cdcs) 

This presentation will introduce the Configurable Data Curation System (CDCS) platform, describe the context that motivated the growth of this infrastructure, and discuss how it was extended and applied to address problems in the Additive Manufacturing Benchmark Test Series (AM-Bench) project at NIST. It will provide a particular view of what it was like to organically grow this infrastructure and various stakeholder communities around it to address various problems in data-management, curation, informatics, and configuration-management. Exploring the history of AM-Bench’s CDCS-based development and evolution so far, the talk will demonstrate how an R&D project might conceive of defining and solving problems like those of AM-Bench in the first place, and how one might take this kind of problem definition and form a team, systems, and infrastructure that can grow their own best-practices over time.

 

The talk will use this background to show how it is the AM-Bench team was grown and catalyzed by other community-level innovations as well (such as Lucas Hale’s pycdcs REST API client (https://github.com/usnistgov/pycdcs). The talk will mix several themes together:

 1) The notion of community-scale problem-solving

 2) How this has been happening with AM-Bench

 3) How this was supported and catalyzed, in particular cases, by the use of the CDCS itself.

The talk will highlight how the strategies applied in AM-Bench were similar and different from other R&D projects and how these provide examples for other R&D projects with similar needs such as:

 - Complex data and needs for data modeling to support the realistic structure and variation of measurement metadata

 - Integration with analyst data entry mechanisms and automated ingest

 - Use of persistent identification and related mechanisms

 - Definition and support for data versioning systems and best practices

 - Support for metrologists, modelers, and developers

 - Interconnection with additional processes and pieces of infrastructure

In short, the purpose of this presentation is to provide an introduction to the CDCS in the context of AM-Bench itself. Attendees of this presentation will learn about what the CDCS is, where it came from, as well as how it fits into the overall AM-Bench project informatics, infrastructure, and workflow. They will also learn about the metadata provided by AM-Bench CDCS systems, how that is released and versioned, and how they can access and use that data manually and automatically over time. Examples of various use-cases will be highlighted as well as some discussion of current and future plans relative to CDCS infrastructure for AM-Bench over time.

Presenting Author: Benjamin Long National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Presenting Author Biography: Benjamin Long has worked closely with collaborators at NIST and elsewhere over the past decade to build and grow a distributed informatics platform called the Configurable Data Curation System (CDCS). This continues to be used to support, connect, and integrate into scientific communities, workflows, research, and data at different levels. His work and interests, for the past 25 years, have involved understanding how data, systems, and analytical strategies can be applied to solve complex problems across knowledge domains.

Authors:

Benjamin Long National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Chandler Becker National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Gretchen Greene National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Gerard Lemson National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Lyle Levine National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Jaiwon Kim National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Shengyen Li National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)