Enabling Research and Open Science Through Interfaces That Speak Science

The challenges of turning scientific data into scientific discovery grow significantly as data volumes and computing resources to process them increase daily. While the community is beginning to lay the groundwork to make these resources more generally available, disk space and compute nodes are (albeit important!) implementation details of the solution. For example, even if a researcher had local access to the whole of publicly available astronomical data and limitless processing power, she would still be faced with tens of millions of files, data organization that varies by mission or telescope, a myriad of sources of documentation, and other challenges to be addressed before getting to science. The solution to this problem is to present an interface to the researcher that encapsulates all of these details in a way that allows her to work with science concepts directly versus data management. Such an interface would allow more data to be used more easily, lower the bar for incorporating new data sets, be more open and more accessible, and exemplify the principles of open science. As much work should be done as possible to allow the researcher to focus on the science, not data management. The mechanisms by which data are archived and advanced computing resources are made available to the community should be informed by what is needed to create and support such an interface and not be left as a final step. Examples of such an interface and what would be needed to implement and support them will be presented as a road map for upcoming infrastructure work.