NSF Community-based Data Interoperability Networks (INTEROP) Proposal Solicitation
A solicitation for proposals has been issued by the NFS's US National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure with the goals of funding projects supporting the re-use and re-purposing of data, data discovery, interoperability and "consensus-building activities and for providing the expertise necessary to turn the consensus into technical standards with associated implementation tools and resources."
Scientific data is very expensive to acquire, and much of it cannot be reproduced, due to its temporal nature. Vast resources of data acquired through publicly-funded research languish due to the lack of archiving of these data sets. Much of this exists on the hard-drives and (yes) floppy disks of researchers, much of which is thrown away when the researcher retires.
Both due to the loss of dataset, and the lack of standard metadata (some disciplines are better off than others) and tools for the discovery and use (interoperability) of existing data sets, re-use and re-purposing of data is -- at present -- very limited, and the kind of unforeseen and creative use of data analogous to the Web 2.0 mashups are not possible. The metastudies and metasyntheses that are often more revealing and more powerful than the original works need to be made possible.
Thanks to Cliff Lynch (CNI) for pointing out this solicitation.
Additional references:
Scientific data is very expensive to acquire, and much of it cannot be reproduced, due to its temporal nature. Vast resources of data acquired through publicly-funded research languish due to the lack of archiving of these data sets. Much of this exists on the hard-drives and (yes) floppy disks of researchers, much of which is thrown away when the researcher retires.
Both due to the loss of dataset, and the lack of standard metadata (some disciplines are better off than others) and tools for the discovery and use (interoperability) of existing data sets, re-use and re-purposing of data is -- at present -- very limited, and the kind of unforeseen and creative use of data analogous to the Web 2.0 mashups are not possible. The metastudies and metasyntheses that are often more revealing and more powerful than the original works need to be made possible.
Thanks to Cliff Lynch (CNI) for pointing out this solicitation.
Additional references:
- NSF's 1998 Workshop: Interfaces to Scientific Data Archives. CalTech
- SODA: A self-service online digital archive for unloved scientific data. Rex Saunders. Geoinformatics 2007 Conference (17–18 May 2007) San Diego, California.
- Management Issues for Permanent Access to Scientific Information: Increases in Programmatic Scale and Change. Raymond McCord. A Presentation for “Workshop on Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America: Focus on Health and Environmental Information for Sustainable Development.” May 9, 2007 Atibaia, SP, Brazil.
- Metasynthesis: The State of the Art—So Far.Deborah Finfgeld. Qualitative Health Research, Vol. 13, No. 7, 893-904 (2003).
Create, curate, re-use: the expanding life course of digital research data. Chris Rusbridge. 2007. Digital Curation Centre.
The Special Case of Scientific Data Sharing with Education. (2006) The Special Case of Scientific Data Sharing with Education. In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43, Austin (US).
- New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe.Chuck Humphrey. 2006.
- Digital Data Preservation and Curation: A Collaboration Among Libraries, Publishers, and the Virtual Observatory. Robert Hanisch et al. Open Data (ALA 06).
Scientific Data and Knowledge within the Information Society. Brian McMahon. CODATA 2006 - Beijing, 22-25 October 2006.
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