Zzzoot

F rancine Berman's call for a research data census in the U.S. recognizes the reality that the valuable research assets produced by public (and private) research funding is uncounted, mostly unmanaged, and destined to be, or in the process of being, degraded, damaged and lost. Lost to future research, re-use, re-purposing. While a census is useful when your knowledge about a topic is effectively zero , as in this case, I don't think that it is a good ongoing solution to this particular problem. Distributed and open research data repositories, open standards like OAI-PMH , rich metadata (and the tools to create/manage them) and the will of funding agencies and research organizations can all come together to make a real-time census possible. But an initial census is clearly needed, in order properly discover the complete nature of the research data problem, in order to plan the processes, infrastructure and organizations to properly deal it. Berman, F. 2010. We Need a Research D...

Data, data everywhere The Economist , 00130613, 2/27/2010, Vol. 394, Issue 8671 All too much: Monstrous amounts of data

The School of Information Studies (iSchool) at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., has introduced a new program (in collaboration with Cornell University Library) called " Building an eScience Librarianship Curriculum for an eResearch Future ". It is focused on creating librarians with a better understanding of eScience and the research process, as well as the new types of digital resources - in particular research data and their long term preservation and use - and how to manage them. Right now they have a call out for applications for scholarships that they have for this new program. The lack of eScience and research data savvy librarians is one of the gaps identified by the Research Data Canada and is the focus of its capacity working group.

Today in Washington. D.C, the CODATA organized Symposium on the Data Sharing Plans and on the Scientific Benefits of Data Sharing in GEOSS was held. Among other things, it looked at the draft GEOSS data sharing plan: The Plan, now endorsed by 80 government Members and 56 Participating Organizations, highlights the following GEOSS Data Sharing Principles: There will be full and open exchange of data, metadata, and products shared within GEOSS, recognizing relevant international instruments and national policies and legislation. All shared data, metadata, and products will be made available with minimum time delay and at minimum cost. All shared data, metadata, and products being free of charge or no more than cost of reproduction will be encouraged for research and education. Programme: Part One: Implementing the GEOSS Data Sharing Principles How We Got There and Where We're Going . Beth Greenaway. UK Environmental Observation Network An Overview of the Key Substantive Provisions ...

As yet another newspaper "gets it" and launches an API (" Open Platform ") to its content (" Newspaper as a Platform: Guardian Launches API" - ReadWriteWeb), leveraging the creativity of the masses for the creation of mashups, mixins and just plain wonderful and wonky applications, I can only hope that the holders of significant scientific content, like scientific publishers and aggregators, will also move in this direction. Nature's OTMI seems a rather Web 1.0 inspired effort, and with limited usability at that (although Nature has stopped working on OTMI). Exposing research article contents (full text, metadata, citations, datasets, ontologies, etc) - even it be 6+ months old - to the world through a sensible (and maybe even shared/standard) API would create an explosion of mashups ranging from incredible researcher-oriented knowledge discovery tools to normal human being-oriented applications for finding things like as-yet-unreported possible da...