[okfn-discuss] Building the (Open) Data Ecosystem

Wed Apr 6 13:51:39 UTC 2011

(top reply)

Ben,

What a great article. Dunno why, but it really brings to mind the following I read yesterday (in some strange way, both articles pull the same strings in my heart)

[http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/04/success-and-farming-vs-mining.html]

As scientists, are we going to be farmers, or miners?

On Apr 6, 2011, at 8:12 AM, Ben O'Steen wrote:

> There was an article I found via twitter that seems to be very pertinent
> to this discussion. I'll include the paragraphs that summed up the
> current data situation and drives:
> 
> "When datasets were sparse and only connected to the lab that produced
> them, we would brood every one of them, protect (patent) them and work
> on them in isolation in order to 'sell' them as chickens, usually in the
> form of a largely narrative article. Other scientists need to combine a
> minimum of two existing publications to generate new eggs and breed more
> chickens. However, chickens have become overabundant: more than 20
> million articles exist in biomedicine alone. More recently, valuable
> aggregations of data were brought online (for example, data sets in GEO,
> curated databases such as SwissProt and locus-specific human gene
> variation databases (locus-specific databases such as the Leiden Open
> Variation Database LOVD). Now, data (eggs) have become a direct source
> of new in silico discoveries and a unit of scientific trade.
> 
> But the scientific market has no way to value eggs because the entire
> system is built upon judging and exchanging chickens for acknowledgement
> and credit (through citations and other measures of impact). On the
> other hand, for effective and evidence-based breeding, we need the eggs
> as well as information from the parent chickens to assess the value of
> the eggs. This is where a major challenge lies: in the long overdue
> adaptation in scholarly communication. The data-intensive science wave
> that has come over us calls for innovative ways of data sharing,
> stewardship and valuation. We must respect the connection between the
> articles and the data and value both appropriately."
> 
> 
> [Full article at:
> http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v43/n4/full/ng0411-281.html
> (Nature Genetics 43, 281–283 (2011) doi:10.1038/ng0411-281)
> 
> "The value of data"
> 
> Abstract - "Data citation and the derivation of semantic constructs
> directly from datasets have now both found their place in scientific
> communication. The social challenge facing us is to maintain the value
> of traditional narrative publications and their relationship to the
> datasets they report upon while at the same time developing appropriate
> metrics for citation of data and data constructs."]
> 
> ..

--
Puneet Kishor http://punkish.org
Research http://carbonmodel.org
Science Fellow http://creativecommons.org