Grant Details

The purpose of this program is to encourage submission of proposals for activities that will enable communities to develop
visions for data-intensive SBE and EHR areas of research. In some cases large scale databases may already exist, but the
infrastructure such as tools and communities to utilize the data may be in need of development. In other cases appropriate activities may include the design of large scale databases and/or associated analytic tools. Databases could include traditional relational data, collections of historical data, or many other forms of structured sets of data. The primary objectives of proposals under this program are to organize a research community or engage an existing research community to design and, perhaps, prototype data-intensive research infrastructure for the SBE and EHR areas of research. The current year of this BCC competition will not support implementation of such infrastructure, though such funding is anticipated for subsequent years. For the purpose of this competition, data-intensive research is defined as research involving data resources that are well beyond the storage requirements, computational intensiveness or complexity that is currently typical of the SBE or EHR areas of research. Proposals should make clear how the proposed activities will enable promising SBE or EHR research that would not otherwise be possible.

Submitted proposals for FY 2013 should focus on the development of communities, plans for database design or utilization, and infrastructure (including analytic tools) within which identified research may effectively proceed. The NSF's Research Coordination Network (RCN) solicitation and past RCN awards may provide helpful examples of ways to structure community building activities. RCN solicitation requirements, however, do not apply to BCC proposals. While the development of a prototype is permissible, the focus of FY 2013 projects should NOT be the implementation of a data resource, but rather building a broader community and capacity to design and eventually use a resource.
This 2013 competition is the second round in what, funds permitting, is envisioned as a multiyear initiative. The 2012 and 2013 competitions are designed to permit research teams to establish the groundwork for larger scale (approximately $1,000,000) projects in future competitions which would either result in a developed database or research tool or provide the basis for a significantly larger NSF request. The first of potentially multiple larger scale competitions is planned for 2014, funding permitted. Thus, while FY13 stresses community involvement in the design of the infrastructure, FY14 is anticipated to allow implementation projects, as well as continued community building efforts.

Successful proposals will outline activities that will have significant impacts across multiple fields by enabling new types of data-intensive research. Investigators should think broadly and create a vision that extends intellectually across multiple disciplines and that includes--but is not limited to--the SBE or EHR areas of research. Proposals will need to describe the bodies of data and other resources that will be involved in the infrastructure. "Infrastructure" includes data, data structures, metadata, analytics and those tools needed to facilitate research in SBE and EHR areas of research. Investigators should think creatively about data and consider new data collections, re-purposed existing data, and new approaches to data as appropriate for the research questions of interest. Novel approaches are encouraged. Proposals should have a well defined work plan with steps sufficiently detailed. An explicit goal of this competition is to focus on building broad and large scale infrastructure which extends well beyond a single discipline and which will be utilized by a large number and wide range of researchers. While it is acceptable, for example, to focus data collection on a single city or geographic region, the relevance of the proposed work should be of interest to a national or international community.

Successful proposals also should examine the following questions in an integrated manner:

1. What broad, important, fundamental research questions are to be addressed? What research communities would be interested in exploring these questions?
2. What kinds of data are to be involved, including the metadata and the broader infrastructure in which the data are embedded? The data involved may be newly gathered, newly aggregated, and/or newly created.
3. How will the databases/assets be constructed? What new analytic or statistical approaches are needed to analyze the data?
4. What infrastructure is required to ensure access to and long-term maintenance of these large-scale data?

In addition, investigators should begin thinking about these related longer-term issues:

1. What types of infrastructure and data acquisition approaches are required to support wide scale deployment and use?
2.  How will these new research communities address governance and sustainability issues?