It is an open, collaborative project administered by Research Data Alliance's (RD-A) DDRI WorkGroup. The way RD-Switchboard operates is analogous to the discovery functions featured on online bookstores such as Amazon. These sites link items, based on similar publishers, authors, and related topics. In the case of RD-Switchboard, items are linked through co-authorship, joint funding, and research grants. The system aggregates these links from national and international registries, utilizing graph modeling technology to identify the missing links between data sets.