ANDS is very much concerned with making data “first class”  objects analogous to papers, especially in the sense that they should be able to be discovered in their own right.  During questions, we ended up briefly looking at and discussing the I2S2 research activity lifecycle model.

Now, unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to talk through and explain the lifecycle model and looking at it “cold” the impression is that “data” are treated as 2nd class citizens and whether they can be found or not seems to be dependent on their being cited in papers.  So, maybe the model needs clarification, since there is no reason why data cannot be surfaced independently of papers through the central (green) stack in the lifecycle model; this would very much depend on appropriate metadata being made public, harvestable and web crawlable.