DataNet: notice board entry
This is a public group
Stating interests
- Posted by:
- Peter Brantley (group admin)
- Date:
- 04 October 2007
- Comments:
- 4 comments
I wonder if folks are able to indicate what they anticipate working on, or would like to work on, by starting forum threads, or even notices?
NSF cannot officially bless this site, but they have indicated that they will be alerting potential partners to its utility.
I’m a Brit, so presumably not directly involved. However I was invited to the NSF/JISC meeting in Phoenix on “data-driven science” which reported recently and had an ambitious approach to cyberscholarship (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~repwkshop/NSF-JISC-report.pdf => Building the Infrastructure for
Cyberscholarship). It’s an obvious area for coordinated international collaboration, which of course, is part of the cyberscholarship.
The OGC Interoperability Institute (OGCii) is an educational and research institution dedicated to the application and refinement of interoperable data models and services for the seamless exchange of spatial and temporal information in the context of scientific and other academic enterprise, see www.ogcii.org. We work with universities and other research centers throughout N.America, UK, Europe, and Australia to harmonize data models and web services for interdisciplinary access and use, dealing with cultural & institutional barriers, not just technical. We see data model harmonization and interoperability as a key semantic aspect of long-term data preservation, and have experience with many different domains and very large datasets such as satellite and aerial imagery, ground survey information, meteorological, geological, oceanographic, hydrologic, soil, agricultural, biodiversity, and environmental data of all kinds.
We would like to team with others working on a response to NSF 07-601, to forward the prospects for long-term, interoperable data preservation worldwide.
In a similar way that NPG is now facilitating science discussion thru these web forums, BIOSCI/Bionet has fostered open bioscience news and discussion on the Internet for more than 20 years now. It however depends on donated services from academic groups, and its growth in aspects is limited and fragile.
Today’s science digital libraries are most often single-point projects that are world-wide and easily accessible and copyable, where the major effort is made by an expert interest group that may be small (e.g. one organism’s knowledge, or one science community’s collaborative discussions).
However funding of library collections remains focused on a per institution model of replicating hard-copy issues of books and journals, now with electronic subscriptions, with little or no investment in the longevity of the information sources.
I hope to see DataNet partners change that somehow, with a look at long-term models for sustaining single source, focused science information projects. Biology is full of such rather long-term data management projects, and funding them past a 2-3 year single-grant period remains problematic. I’d like to see the projects that I help facilitate grow under a new mainenance model, where now these are sustained by creative grantsmanship and much donated effort.
My background in biology digital libraries is outlined here
I think the solicitation has raised the profile for datanet-like activities, hopefully to the advantage for a variety of groups that have been working on projects for a while (e.g., we are working on 4 other data archive/repository related NSF proposals right now). And likewise for others who can now leverage it to initiate discussions and investigations with researchers, IT and cyber people. And that’s pretty cool. Given institutional boundaries regarding sensitivity of proposal information, I wonder if there is opportunity to talk about what the solicititation does for integrating activities, building relationships or leveraging opportunities from various corners on (and off) campus???