Why DANDI?

As an exercise, let’s assume you lose all the data in your lab. What would you want from the archive? Our hope is that your answer to this question, the necessary data and metadata that you need, is at least what we should be storing.

Our goals for the archive, we think, are rather simple:

1. Optimize storage based on cost to produce and process.
2. Enable reproducible practices and publications.
3. Enable secondary uses of data outside the intent of the study.
4. Reduce the need to contact data producers by enriching the data with rich m etadata.
5. If users have to come back to the raw data, for example, to apply different processing strategies, etc., it should be feasible without going to the data producer.
6. The archive is not just an endpoint to dump data, it is intended as a living repository that enables collaboration within and across labs, and for others, the entry point for research.

Proposed DANDI architecture

Proposed DANDI Timeline