Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW)

An open-source, self-hostable DMP-authoring platform that generates data management plans from versioned, branching questionnaire 'knowledge models' rather than static funder templates, developed and stewarded as an ELIXIR infrastructure tool and released under the Apache License 2.0.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A university research data office self-hosts DSW via Docker and builds a knowledge model combining its institutional data policy with a funder's DMP requirements, so researchers answer one branching questionnaire instead of a blank template.

Is an instance

An ELIXIR national node uses the hosted ds-wizard.org instance to give researchers FAIR-aligned guidance while they build a living DMP that is revisited past the proposal stage.

The Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) is an open-source, Docker-deployable platform for authoring and maintaining Data Management Plans (DMPs) through guided, questionnaire-style “knowledge models” rather than free-text templates alone. It is developed and maintained as an ELIXIR infrastructure tool, with core development led by the Czech ELIXIR node and Czech Technical University in Prague, and released under the Apache License 2.0 on GitHub (github.com/ds-wizard).

What distinguishes DSW from DMPTool and DMPRoadmap

DSW, DMPTool, and DMPonline all address the same core need — producing a compliant DMP against a funder or institutional template — but they take different architectural approaches:

Knowledge-model driven questionnaires. Instead of a single fixed template per funder, DSW represents DMP requirements as versioned “knowledge models” — structured trees of questions, branching logic, and reference guidance — that an institution or discipline community can compose, fork, and extend. DMPRoadmap-based tools (DMPTool, DMPonline) instead use funder/institution-specific static templates with free-text answer fields and structured review workflows.
Self-hostable, open-source stack. DSW ships as a set of open-source Docker images (client, server, and supporting services) that any institution can deploy on its own infrastructure, in addition to using the hosted ds-wizard.org instance. DMPRoadmap is also open source and self-hostable (it underlies both DMPTool in the US and DMPonline in the UK), but DSW’s knowledge-model architecture is a distinct design choice, not merely an alternative deployment of the same codebase.
“Living” plans and machine-actionable export. DSW positions itself explicitly around the “living DMP” concept — a plan that is revisited and updated across the research lifecycle rather than filed once at proposal stage — and supports export aligned with the Research Data Alliance (RDA) DMP Common Standard for machine-actionable DMPs, similar in intent to DMPRoadmap’s DMP ID / RDA JSON export capability.
Governance and community. DSW is stewarded through ELIXIR (the European life-sciences research infrastructure) and used by ELIXIR national nodes, universities, and research infrastructures across Europe. DMPTool is a US-focused service operated by the California Digital Library; DMPonline is the UK Digital Curation Centre’s hosted DMPRoadmap instance.

Core capabilities

Smart, branching questionnaires built from reusable, versionable knowledge models rather than static form templates.
Collaborative editing with commenting and version history for team-authored plans.
Customizable document templates that render questionnaire answers into funder- or institution-specific output documents.
FAIR-principles guidance embedded in the questioning flow to help researchers align data practices with FAIR as they answer.
Self-hosting via open-source Docker images, or use of the hosted public instance at ds-wizard.org.

Example

A university research data office deploys its own DSW instance and builds a knowledge model encoding both its institutional data policy and a specific funder’s DMP requirements; researchers then answer the resulting branching questionnaire instead of filling in a blank Word template, and the tool renders a compliant DMP document plus a machine-actionable export.

Counter-example

A researcher using the hosted DMPTool service to fill in an NSF-specific DMP template is using a DMPRoadmap deployment, not DSW — the two tools solve the same problem but are separate codebases with different underlying architectures (static templates vs. knowledge-model questionnaires), and a plan authored in one is not natively portable to the other without going through a common export format such as the RDA DMP Common Standard.

References

Data Stewardship Wizard, “What is DSW,” ds-wizard.org.
Data Stewardship Wizard GitHub organization, github.com/ds-wizard.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-stewardship-wizard-dsw" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-stewardship-wizard-dsw",
  "name": "Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-stewardship-wizard-dsw",
  "description": "An open-source, self-hostable DMP-authoring platform that generates data management plans from versioned, branching questionnaire 'knowledge models' rather than static funder templates, developed and stewarded as an ELIXIR infrastructure tool and released under the Apache License 2.0.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/machine-actionable-dmps#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-stewardship-wizard-dsw",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-18T06:30:48",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}