Data Braids — Federated Science Catalog

Real data. Sovereign hardware. Full provenance braids. Verify it yourself. Take it with you.

westGate has ingested 519 GB across 130+ datasets and 17+ science domains through the complete Provenance Trio pipeline. Every dataset has a sweetGrass braid — a W3C PROV-O JSON-LD attestation recording who ingested the data, when, from where, under what license, and the cryptographic chain proving it hasn’t been tampered with.

This is proof of provenance over external data. We didn’t create it, but we can prove exactly what it is, where it came from, and that it’s unmodified. The braid is the access and verification layer.

Want to take data with you? See Transplant — Carry the Data With You for how pseudoSpores and lithoSpores let you carry data + provenance to your own hardware.

Data Braids vs. pseudoSpores

These are two fundamentally different things:

Together they form the complete evidence surface: what went in, and what came out.

Catalog

What “FULL” Provenance Means

Every dataset passes through seven stages, each independently verifiable. The sweetGrass braid ties them together:

External source (NCBI, RCSB, EBI, ...)
    ↓ download
nestGate content.put → BLAKE3 hash (content identity)
    ↓
rhizoCrypt dag.session.create → DAG vertex (lineage)
    ↓
loamSpine spine.create → Merkle certificate (immutable record)
    ↓
bearDog crypto.sign_ed25519 → Ed25519 signature (witness)
    ↓
sweetGrass braid.create → W3C PROV-O JSON-LD (attribution braid)
    ↓
The braid: who ingested it, when, from where, under what license,
with a cryptographic chain proving the data is unmodified.

The braid is machine-readable (JSON-LD) and human-readable (rendered on these pages). See How Braids Work for the full pipeline.

The Hardware

All data lives on:

• westGate: i9-14900K, 96 GB DDR5, 50.7 TB ZFS raidz1
• Network: 10G LAN to the mesh — zero egress charges
• OS: NixOS, NUCLEUS composition (13/13 primals)

Every byte on the mesh is one less download from the internet. The data grows in latent value — available to every spring and garden at LAN speed.

Browse by Domain

• Structural Biology — PDB, UniProt Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, PDB70
• Drug Discovery — ChEMBL, ZINC20, PubChem, PubChem BioAssay, BindingDB, NF Data Portal
• Gene Expression — LINCS L1000, GTEx V8, GEO SOFT cancer
• Proteomics — UniRef90, PDB structures
• Cancer Genomics — TCGA Xena Hub, COSMIC v104
• Disease Ontology — MONDO, Reactome
• Genomic Reference — RefSeq GRCh38, NCBI Gene, NCBI Taxonomy
• Microbial Evolution — LTEE REL606, SILVA 138.1
• Environmental — NOAA GHCND, USGS earthquakes
• Analytical Chemistry — MassBank NIST
• Biosignals — PhysioNet MIT-BIH, PhysioNet PTB-XL
• Nuclear Physics — AME2020
• Biochemistry — BRENDA enzyme kinetics
• Molecular Simulation — CHARMM36 force fields
• Agriculture — USDA NASS Census

See Also

• What’s Possible — dataset combinations that enable science
• How Braids Work — the provenance pipeline explained
• pseudoSpore Catalog — science we computed (NFTs)
• Verify a pseudoSpore — step-by-step verification guide