The Major Facilities Data Lifecycle in a Nutshell

The CI CoE Pilot project was funded in 2018 and charged with creating a blueprint for a cyberinfrastructure (CI) Center of Excellence, dedicated to supporting NSF major facilities’s (MFs) CI that is critical to achieve science outcomes. To better inform the Pilot's creation of that blueprint, the Pilot team began researching the way MFs manage their data and the cyberinfrastructure (CI) that enables the capture, transformation, and dissemination of science data. From this research, the Pilot team created a lifecycle model to illustrate the way data flows through an MF's CI for the purpose of guiding the Pilot team's work supporting MFs and developing the blueprint. This technical report explains this data lifecycle and discusses how it applies to MFs such as IceCube, LIGO, Rubin Observatory, NEON, and OOI. The team continues to refine this model as it broadens its outreach and support activities to other MFs.