GORC International Model WG

The Global Open Research Commons (GORC) International Model WG works under the umbrella of the GORC IG. NOTE: Earlier versions of the charter refer to Benchmarking - name was changed after discussion with Council.

The GORC IG is working on a set of deliverables to support coordination amongst national, pan-national and domain specific organizations such as the European Open Science Cloud, the African Open Science Platform, and the International Virtual Observatory Alliance as they work to build interoperable resources necessary to enable researchers to address societal grand challenges. The realized vision of GORC will provide frictionless access to all research artifacts including, but not limited to: data, publications, software and compute resources; and metadata, vocabulary, and identification services to everyone everywhere, at all times.

The GORC IG is working to develop a roadmap for global alignment to help set priorities for Commons development and integration. In support of this roadmap, this International Model WG will collect and curate a set of attributes that will allow Commons developers to compare features across science clouds and commons.

When relevant, the WG will also collect information about how existing commons are measuring success, adoption or use of their attributes and services within their organization, such as number or amount of data downloads, contributed software, and similar key performance indicators (KPI) and access statistics.

The WG will create and populate a model or framework to describe Commons attributes, but we are not interested in endorsing, certifying or otherwise placing a value judgement on Commons and their features, nor do we intend this to be the only or penultimate model of a Commons.

The WG is expected to submit final outputs for RDA endorsement in early November 2023. We currently have a version 0.5 draft commons model based on the essential elements of commons identified in the IG definitions document. We have task groups working on refining this draft and plan to have a second draft in July 2023. There is an open call for members of the RDA community to provide feedback on our drafts, join the WG, and join task groups.

Our group communicates through posts on the RDA website as well as directly through email. We meet on the fourth Thursday of the month at 13:00 UTC to hear from commons representatives, and encourage everyone to join these meetings. More information on our meetings and recordings of previous meetings can be found on our Group Meetings wiki page.