Data Working Group

The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who ShareFrom cancer to cosmology, researchers could race ahead by working together-online and in the open

18 January 2010 | Key perspectives | Type: report The Digital Curation Centre is pleased to announce the report "Data Dimensions: Disciplinary Differences in Research Data Sharing, Reuse and Long term Viability" by Key Perspectives, as one of the final outputs of the DCC SCARP project. The project investigated attitudes and approaches to data deposit, sharing and reuse, curation and preservation, over a range of research fields in differing disciplines. The synthesis report (which drew on the SCARP case studies plus a number of others, identified in the Appendix), identifies factors that help understand how curation practices in research groups differ in disciplinary terms. This provides a backdrop to different digital curation approaches.

6-min Video of open data examples at TED conference

National Science Foundation (NSF) is finding ways to make its work more accessible to the general public. 

The conference is being presented jointly with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and in partnership with the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) [External]. The 6 December will offer a programme of workshops. The main conference will take place 7-8 December. the call for papers will be released in March and registration will open in September 2010.

This report has attempted to draw together and synthesise evidence and opinion associated with data-intensive open science from a wide range of sources. The potential impact of data-intensive open science on research practice and research outcomes, is both substantive and far-reaching. There are implications for funding organisations, for research and information communities and for higher education institutions.

The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Demonstration Project, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve at-risk digital information, has been officially launched as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains. Chronopolis is a digital preservation data grid framework being developed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego , the UC San Diego Libraries (UCSDL) , and their partners at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado and the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) . A key goal of the Chronopolis project is to provide cross-domain collection sharing for long-term preservation. Using existing high-speed educational and research networks and mass-scale storage infrastructure investments, the partnership is designed to leverage the data storage capabilities at SDSC, NCAR, and UMIACS to provide a preservation data grid that emphasizes heterogeneous and highly redundant data storage systems.

This paper uses, among other sources, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPS data that covers 1960-2009 to analyze just 2 years of data. The authors do cite the whole CPS, but you have to read the paper to see which bits of that set matter to this paper. The bulk of the paper itself is their explanation of the various statistical methods they used to support their conclusions. The data is neither novel or unique to them. Their analysis however, may be novel and is certainly unique to them. They also provide some technical documentation, e.g. we did x with SPSS. So, ideally, it would be nice to have a citation to the paper, to the 2 year subset of data relevant to it and a citation to the entire BLS CPS data. This is not agricultural economics, but I think that pretty similar patterns will be found there too.

A bold project hopes that getting scientists to share information can deepen their understanding of diseases

At first glance, going "open" would seem like a serious career risk -- years of work could be for nothing if a competitor uses your work to beat you to publication -- but many practitioners of openness say the benefits outweigh those risks

he Open Science Data Initiative is an initiative led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in partnership with Microsoft's Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OSDI is based on OGDI which in turn uses the Azure Services Platform to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of scientific data from government agencies. OSDI is an sample of OGDI's open source 'starter kit' (coming soon) with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API's. OSDI-based web API's can be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc. Whether you are a researcher wishing to use scientific data, a hobyist developer, or a "budding scientist", these open API's will enable you to build innovative applications, visualizations and mash-ups that empower people through access to scientific information. This site is built using the OGDI starter kit software assets and provides interactive access to some publicly-available data sets along with sample code and resources for writing applications using the OSDI APIs.