[open-science] Times Higher Education article on opening up research data

Mon Jul 19 20:08:37 UTC 2010

Re:
>
> so maybe it all comes back to better ways of annotating data.
I think it all comes down to science funders requiring metadata, and  
requiring metadata that conforms to standards. Each discipline's data  
coordination body, coordinating with other data coordinating bodies,  
needs to look at ISO metadata standards, open source and proprietary  
metadata tools, standards for encoding data and standards for  
interfaces on software that produces or ingests data.

For geospatial data, for example, there are the ISO 19115 and ISO  
19119 metadata standards and OGC standards, including the OGC  
("OpenGIS") Observations and Measurements Encoding Standard (O&M) (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/om 
) .

In a Web services world, we will discover that the distinction betwee  
"data files" and "metadata files" is an artifact of primitive 20th  
century computer technology. There should be no distinction between  
these, other than distinctions for the parts of a record, such as we  
have for books: front cover and title, copyright page, title page,  
table of contents, dedication page and acknowledgments, preface,  
introduction, body, footnotes, index, glossary, back cover.  Is such a  
structure too complex for today's digital science documents?

Speak up and be bold, data curators, and coordinate like our planetary  
lease depended on it!

Lance

Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
508-752-0108
lmckee at opengeospatial.org

The OGC: International Location Standards
http://www.opengeospatial.org

On Jul 19, 2010, at 2:07 PM, Jessy Cowan-Sharp wrote:

> interesting development. one point this article raises is the  
> question of how requirements for release might impact longitudinal  
> studies, and in general makes me wonder, when does something become  
> FoI/FOIA-able? when it's pencil marks in a notebook? when the file  
> has been saved? when a statistically significant number of  
> observations have been made?
>
> or put another way, thinking more about sharing that hostile  
> release, when is a data set complete enough to share? when does a  
> set of observations become a data set? are there ways to dictate "in  
> progress" or even "stream data"?
>
> one of the biggest arguments against data sharing in science is that  
> those who haven't been intimately involved with the project  
> "wouldn't get it". this seems like a misnomer to me, since lack of  
> availability/exposure to raw data only exacerbates our lack of  
> literacy with it. but especially with charged issues like climate  
> change it's easy to see how sharing can backfire.
>
> so maybe it all comes back to better ways of annotating data.
>
> anyway, bit of a rhetorical rant i guess, but worth thinking about.
>
> jessy
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Jonathan Gray  
> <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> Interesting...
>
> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=412475&c=2
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
>
> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> http://identi.ca/jwyg
>
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>
>
> -- 
> Jessy Cowan-Sharp
> http://jessykate.com
>
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Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
508-752-0108
lmckee at opengeospatial.org

The OGC: International Location Standards
http://www.opengeospatial.org