A data mesh (aka data ecosystem) consists of two or more data commons, data repositories, knowledgebases, and applications over a common set of services (called mesh services). An optional data hub can search and discover data from across the mesh and move the data to a Gen3 Workspace for exploring and analyzing the data.
In a healthy data ecosystem, one finds multiple data commons, data repositories, knowledgebases, and other sources of data alongside cloud-computing platforms for large-scale processing of data and data portals, cloud-based workspaces, Jupyter notebooks and other applications for exploring and analyzing data.
The Gen3 Mesh Services are a minimal set of software services that provide open APIs for indexing data objects, associating metadata with the data objects, and controlling user access to data via a robust and flexible access control policy engine.
Gen3 Data Commons are cyberinfrastructure that co-locates data analysis, exploration and visualization tools with data management services for import and export of structured information like clinical, phenotypic, or biospecimen data, and data objects, like genomics data files or medical images.
Gen3 workspaces are secure data analysis environments in the cloud that can access data from one or more data resources, including Gen3 Data Commons. Workspaces are often fully integrated with a specific data commons, and coming soon are workspaces as stand-alone analysis environments with a user pay model.