What does a National Data Management Strategy need to consider?

Posted November 15, 2007 * Comments(0)

Data Management can mean different things in different research domains. The tools and methods for managing data in high-energy physics may appear to have no relationship with the data needs of the social scientists. But there are common elements, and a national strategy can focus on those that permeate the many domains in research.

Here I’ve attempted to highlight the many various dimensions to data management and provide further references to some relevant technologies and examples, starting with the core common infrastructure working down to where there are domain-specifics tools and methods. Read more »

Academic Recognition for producing strategically important research Datasets

Posted November 12, 2007 * Comments(0)

Yesterday I attended a very nice talk by Prof Edward Vanden Berghe (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA) on OBIS: the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. OBIS publishes, and integrates online, over 13 million locations of 80,000 species from over 230 databases; it is the marine thematic node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. (More about OBIS below).

When discussing the issues and challenges ahead for OBIS, he mentioned a matter that I have pondered for some time: domain-specific data repositories and collections, (which increasingly underpin research in that domain, such as OBIS), will only be sustainable if the researchers get academic recognition for providing their datasets for the collection. This relates to researcher motivation…. Read more »