Research Infrastructure: Leveraging the Research Data Ecosystem for ICPSR's Comprehensive Data Archive

This project enhances the ability of the Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) to improve access to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research’s (ICPSR) Comprehensive Data Archive, the world’s largest social science data archive. In this project, ICPSR at the University of Michigan transitions its vast repository of over 20,000 studies and 6 million variables to RDE’s cutting-edge digital platform. This enhances the findability and usability of essential data resources. RDE’s modern technology gives scientists across the fields of science and engineering the ability to efficiently access and analyze different data types, increasing the reproducibility of their research. Such improvements are vital for advancing scientific breakthroughs that can lead to groundbreaking discoveries and for supporting data-driven policy decisions that can bolster national health, prosperity, and welfare and contribute to national security. Moreover, metadata mapping and enrichment analysis align existing data to FAIR standards, ensuring the discoverability and interoperability of various data types, including video and geospatial data, and increasing AI readiness. These invaluable data resources are made more accessible to all Americans, thereby enriching data literacy and strengthening the U.S. data workforce.

This project migrates ICPSR's extensive data archives to the modernized Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) software platform, enabling improved data accessibility, usability, and security. Utilizing a robust ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, ICPSR's over 20,000 studies and 6 million variables are transitioned from outdated systems using a scalable and robust Data Migration Framework involving backend services and infrastructure for security and storage. Metadata mapping and enrichment analysis align existing data to FAIR standards, ensuring the discoverability and interoperability of various data types, including video and geospatial data. Workflow mapping analysis consolidates complex and disparate workflows from ICPSR’s legacy systems to a streamlined workflow in the modernized RDE platform, delivering a significantly better user experience for depositors, curators, project managers, reviewers, and administrative staff. Through three phases, the migration progressively integrates self-published, high-value public-use, and restricted datasets into the RDE software platform. This enables new and advanced functionalities, including for metadata enhancement, data exploration, and secure cloud-based analysis.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2513364
Principal Investigator: Margaret Levenstein
Funds Obligated: $1,753,908
State: MI