This post is by Alena Rybkina, a member of the CODATA Executive Committee, of the CODATA Early Career Data Professionals Group, and a participant in the Task Group on Earth and Space Science Data Interoperability.

The ‘Task Group on Earth and Space Science Data Interoperability’ (TG-ESSDI) published an electronic version of the first edition of the Atlas of the Earth’s Magnetic Field in 2013. It includes a unified set of physical, geographic, thematic, and historical materials for a detailed study of the geomagnetic field from 1500 to 2010. The Atlas is intended for a wide range of scientists, teachers, students and experts in applied areas relating to the geosciences, including geologists and geophysicists studying geomagnetism. The Atlas is a unique cartographic product that contains comprehensive and scientifically grounded characteristics of geomagnetic phenomenon, and contains the results of historical and modern studies of the Earth’s magnetic field.

In May 2015, with support from CODATA and hosted by ICSU, TG-ESSDI organised an international workshop on ‘The Atlas of the Earth’s Magnetic Field. Second Edition’. The meeting was designed as a launch event for the project to create the second edition of The Atlas, with the aim of significantly extending the content of The Atlas. The list of participants included specialists in the geomagnetic studies with representatives from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, the Commission for the Geological Map of the World (CGMW), the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA), and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) etc.

The workshop resulted in a document that is expected to become the base for the content of the Second Edition. It was agreed to include following new or extended chapters:

• Current knowledge of the magnetic field. Main field. From ~8000 to 2020.
• SWARM data (satellite was launched by ESA in November 2013)
• Regional scale maps (including Arctic and Antarctic maps)
• Magnetic fields of the Solar System: Sun, Mars and other planets
• Applications of the magnetic field data (drilling, navigation, GPS, dykes etc)

A further meeting organised to coincide with the 26th General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), which was held from 22 June to 2 July 2015 in Prague, Czech Republic. The conference was characterised by the central theme: ‘Earth and Environmental Sciences for Future Generations’.  A presentation about the Second Edition of the Atlas was given by Alena Rybkina and feedback was received through subsequent discussions and working meetings organised by TG-ESSDI. As a result of these discussions, it was decided, for example, to extend the historical chapter of the Atlas and include historical charts from Spain, from the magnetic observatory of Barcelona, as well as from South Africa, Czech Republic and other locations. Thus the Second Edition of the Atlas will extend its geographic reach and become an even more important and valuable project for the magnetic field and earth data community.

This post is by Elizabeth Griffin, chair of the CODATA Data at Risk Task Group, and – as she explains below – now co-chair of the related RDA Interest Group on Data Rescue.

The CODATA Data at Risk Task Group (DAR-TG) has suddenly got much larger! It has now become affiliated to the Research Data Alliance, through the formation of an RDA Interest Group for “Data Rescue”.

The combined group (known as IG-DAR-TG) shares all the same scientific principles, the same objectives (and even the same ‘language’) as its natal CODATA Task Group for “Data At Risk”; the two Groups will maintain their own identities within the merged affiliated one, but share the benefits of the two supporting organisations.

The topic of “Data Rescue” is becoming recognized as vitally important to researchers, particularly in matters of climate change and global warming. Just about every scientific study can benefit substantially from being able to access to its heritage data at some point, for some purpose.

Data Rescue involves two strands of data management:

1. the recovery and digitization of analogue data – those too historic to have been born-digital – and;
2. adding essential value to archives of (mostly early) electronic ones – metadata, format information, access.

Accounts of the successful recovery and upgrading or digitization of holder data brim over with the unique scientific benefits, which then improve the sort of modelling that is critical for predicting future conditions. It’s a win-win situation, so why are “Data Rescue” initiatives even necessary?  This is:

1. because the challenges of extracting data and information from outmoded, analogue technology can be considerable;
2. because this process generally requires important information about the platform and mode of gathering data that can be very hard to reconstruct; and,
3. because such initiatives also need to counter a general disbelief that they even exist or could ever be scientifically useful. It is important to counter the widespread assumption that all data of value are born-digital.

We hope and plan that that new Data Rescue initiative will waken up the world to the huge potential waiting to be recovered! Please join us, either through the CODATA Task Group “Data At Risk” or the RDA branch “Data Rescue”.

This post is by Elizabeth Griffin, chair of the CODATA Data at Risk Task Group.

Every two years, climate scientists at Elsevier (New York) and IEDA (Integrated Earth Data Applications, Columbia University), jointly support and award the International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences for the best project that describes the ‘rescue’ of heritage data in the context of the geosciences. The result of the competition for 2014-15 was announced at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), held in April in Vienna. The strength and scope of the competition had increased significantly since the 2013 one.

A shortlist of four was announced in Vienna: with three receiving ‘honourable mention’.  The winner of the 2015 International Data Rescue Award in the Geosciences was British Macrofossils Online, a Jisc-funded project from the British Geological Survey to create a fully electronic catalogue of all the fossil collections in UK museums and similar repositories. The project team consisted of Mike Howe, Caroline Buttler, Dan Pemberton, Eliza Howlett, Tim McCormick, Simon Harris and Michela Contessi working alongside a number of other contributors.

During the same ceremony, a Special Issue of an online journal, GeoResJ, was launched: it was given over entirely to descriptions of data rescue projects, and featured a six-page introductory article by the CODATA “Data At Risk” Task Group (DAR-TG) team, entitled ‘When are Old Data New Data?’.

Opening the meeting in Vienna, Dr Elizabeth Griffin (Chair, DAR-TG) explained and illustrated the considerable scientific importance of recovering scientific information that was recorded before the electronic age, and what CODATA (through its TG) was attempting to do towards stimulating many more data recovery efforts. The visibility which the evening afforded to the DAR-TG and to CODATA itself was very valuable, the event presenting a memorable complement of rationale, endeavour and achievement. Open publicity of this nature is one of the goals of the DAR-TG; it is essential for spreading the word about undertaking and (then) coordinating efforts to bring archived, nearly lost, or almost unreadable data back into full service.

This post comes from Xaiogang (Marshall) Ma, a core member of the CODATA Early Career Data Professionals Group (ECDP).  He was a winner of one of the inaugural World Data System Stewardship Awards at SciDataCon 2014.  Marshall is an Associate Research Scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, specialising in Semantic eScience and Data Science.  Check out his RPI Homepage here.

During May 25-29, 2015, the Global Young Academy (GYA) held the 5th International Conference for Young Scientists and its Annual General Meeting at Montebello, Quebec, Canada. I attended the public day of the conference on May 27, as a delegate of the CODATA Early Career Data Professionals Working Group (ECDP).

The GYA was founded in 2010 and its objective is to be the voice of young scientists around the world. Members are chosen for their demonstrated excellence in scientific achievement and commitment to service. Currently there are 200 members from 58 countries, representing all major world regions. Most GYA members attended the conference at Montebello, together with about 40 guests from other institutions, including Prof.  Gordon McBean, president of the International Council for Science and Prof. Howard Alper, former co-chair of IAP: the Global Network of Science Academies.

GYA issued a position statement on Open Science in 2012, which calls for scientific results and data to be made freely available for scientists around the world, and advocates ways forward that will transform scientific research into a truly global endeavour. Dr. Sabina Leonelli from the University of Exeter, UK is one of the lead authors of the position statement, and also a lead of the GYA Open Science Working Group. A major objective of my attendance to the GYA conference was to discuss the future opportunities on collaborations between CODATA-ECDP and GYA. Besides Sabina, I also met Dr. Abdullah Tariq, another lead of the GYA Open Science WG, and several other members of the GYA executive committee.

The discussion was successful. We mentioned the possibility of an interest group in Global Open Science within CODATA, to have a few members join both organizations, to propose sessions on the diversity of conditions under which open data work around the world, perhaps for the next CODATA/RDA meeting in Paris or later meetings of the type, to collaborate around business models for data centers, and to reach out to other organizations and working groups of open data and/or open science, etc.

GYA is such an active group both formed and organized by young people. And I was so happy to see that Open Science is one of the four core activities that GYA is currently promoting. I would recommend ECDP and CODATA members to explore the details of GYA activities on their website http://www.globalyoungacademy.net and propose future collaborations to promote topics of common interest on open data and open science.

This post was written by Shiva Khanal, Research Officer with the Department of Forest Research and Survey in Nepal.  Shiva was one of the international scholars sponsored by CODATA to attend the ISI-CODATA International Training Workshop on Big Data.

This March two associated events were co-organized by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI): the International Seminar on Data Science (19-20, Mar 2015)  and ISI CODATA International Training Workshop on Big Data (9-18, Mar 2015). Those events in ISI Bangalore, India, covered a wide range of talks and presentations related to big data with presenters from diverse background such as academic community, business sectors and data scientists.

One way to visualize the focus of the program would be to make plot of terms that were more frequent. I obtained the schedule of presentations and tutorials during seminar (http://drtc1.isibang.ac.in/datascience/schedule.html) and training workshop (http://drtc1.isibang.ac.in/bdworkshop/schedule.html) and generated a word cloud using the R package – wordcloud.

The R code along with the dropbox link to the data is provided. Pasting this on R console will give the word cloud shown here:

Here is the code:

###########################################

#load packages

library(wordcloud)

library(tm)

#read the presentation details

textf = readLines(“http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/111213395/text_file_presentation_titles.txt”)

# get a column of strings.

text_corpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(textf))

# create document term matrix and apply transformations

tdm = TermDocumentMatrix(text_corpus,

      control = list(removePunctuation = TRUE, stripWhitespace=TRUE,

                     stopwords = c(stopwords()),PlainTextDocument =TRUE, removeNumbers = TRUE, tolower = TRUE))

m <- as.matrix(tdm)

v <- sort(rowSums(m),decreasing=TRUE)

d <- data.frame(word = names(v),freq=v)

pal <- brewer.pal(6,”Dark2″)

pal <- pal[-(1)]

#plot the word cloud and save as png

png(“test.png”,width=3.25,height=3.25,units=”in”,res=1200)

wordcloud(d$word,d$freq,c(4,.3),2,,TRUE,TRUE,.15,pal)

dev.off()

###########################################

I also created a word cloud from twitter using #isibigdata (total ~100 tweets). Unlike, the  text based word cloud above, twitter extraction required little bit of customization (setting up credentials for a twitteR session), but otherwise the plotting codes are almost the same).

Nanomaterials are substances containing hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions atoms (with leeway at both ends of that range) that have rapidly evolved into important substances with the potential to impact virtually every area of our physical world – health, food, engineering, transportation, energy.  In many cases, nanomaterials already are part of our world.

Unlike “normal” engineering materials, there is no accepted way to describe nanomaterials such that we know exactly which nanomaterial is being discussed, reported on, regulated, bought, or put into a commercial product.  Simple chemical nomenclature does not suffice. Nanomaterials have solid-like aspects beyond normal chemistry.  Systems used for engineering materials such as ceramics, metals, and polymers, do not capture the nanoscale features of form, size, surfaces, etc., that impart special properties to nanomaterials.

Nanomaterials are also of intense interest of many disciplines, from chemistry, physics, and material science to food, medicine, and nutrition.  The user communities are equally diverse: researchers, product designers, purchasers, regulators, health experts, and many other need to discuss and describe nanomaterials accurately

So what can be done to describe nanomaterials in a way that meets the needs of the diversity of scientific disciplines, user communities, and nanomaterials themselves?  During the last three years, a CODATA-VAMAS Working Group (WG) on Nanomaterials has worked on a multi-disciplinary, multi-user community, international basis to develop a Uniform Description System for Materials on the Nanoscale (UDS).  Version 1.0 of the UDS has recently been released and is publicly available for use, comment, and downloading at www.codata.org/nanomaterials.

The UDS has two primarily goals. The first is to be able to describe a nanomaterial uniquely, so that it is differentiated from all other nanomaterials.  The second is to be able to determine two instances of a nanomaterial are equivalent (the same) to whatever degree desired.  The UDS was designed to meet both goals as well as meet the needs of different disciplines and user communities for as many types of nanomaterials as possible.  The CODATA-VAMAS WG built upon work of many groups including standards committees, database developers, and nanomaterials researchers.

What’s next for the UDS?  The most important next step is to see how the UDS compares with other schemes presently used to build databases of nanomaterials properties.  This involves workshops bringing databases builders together with the CODATA-VAMAS team to compare approaches.  For further information, contact John Rumble at rumble@udsnano.org.

This post comes from Alex de Sherbinin, Chair, CODATA Task Group on Global Roads Data Development and Associate Director for Science Applications, CIESIN, Columbia University

On 16-18 February I had the opportunity to join a distinguished group of science journalists for the 2^nd Kavli Forum, organized by the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ). WSFJ director Damien Chalaud requested that CODATA attend the workshop, and in discussions with Damien, his colleague Veronique Morin, and Lee Holtz, science editor for the Wall Street Journal, we outlined the contours of a talk. More on that below. But first a bit of background.

The meeting was organized in order to engage science journalists from major outlets such as the BBC, Science, Nature, Scientific American, National Public Radio, and major US network news outlets, in the broad topic of data journalism. Talks by journalists, computer scientists and researchers focused on tools that are available to journalists to be able to reduce the huge volumes of information available to them and to analyze data on their own. Example tools include Metro Maps, a tool designed to reduce complex stories into interlinked story lines, and the Overview Project, a content analysis tool designed to help journalists sift through mountains of electronic documents looking for story leads (e.g., the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden). Others introduced terms such as “geojournalism”, using online mapping and data analysis tools to tell the story of environmental change, and computational journalism, using computer programing to uncover stories.

The range of stories that had been uncovered, or at least told better, through data journalism was impressive. Stanford professor and journalist Cheryl Philips, described using publicly accessible records of infrastructure assessments done by the department of transportation in Washington state (USA) to map the most vulnerable bridges and to tell the story behind a bridge that collapsed, killing several people. John Bohannon of Science Magazine used iPython coding to send a fake journal article to close to 200 open access journals in a sting operation to uncover the lack of peer review of a clearly flawed article.

I was given the distinct honor of being the keynote speaker at the opening dinner. I used the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda as a foundation upon which to build an argument on the importance of the Data Revolution for sustainable development. CIESIN has been involved in the effort to compute the price tag for monitoring the goals as a contribution to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, so we have had a front-row seat in assessing the data needs.

The data revolution can be characterized as having two main elements: open data and big data. To build the case for open data, I described a few cases where environmental monitoring and data networks were either insufficient or were in danger of falling apart owing to lack of funds and inattention, including two water examples: the river gauge network of the Global Runoff Data Center (GRDC) and the UNEP-GEMS station-level water quality monitoring network. I pointed out that even in the case of air quality, which increasingly can be monitored from space, there is a need for ground validation based on in situ monitoring networks. I also described the benefits of open government data, and how such data has been found to stimulate economic growth and generate greater tax revenues than old school approaches of selling data.

I then turned to the promise and limitations of big data, aided by a useful primer by Emmanuel Letouzé of the DataPop Alliance. My central argument was that big data – defined by Letouzé as data emanating from our increasing use of digital devices, crowd sourcing or from online transactions, together with increasing computational sophistication and a community of analysts – has tremendous promise, but can never hope to fully supplant well-funded and well-functioning traditional data gathering systems such as census bureaus, national statistical offices, and environmental monitoring networks.

The discussion afterwards explored these issues and also enabled me to provide some data pointers for the journalists as they seek to employ data in their professional duties.

CODATA and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) – and other partners – will convene an International Training Workshop on Big Data. This will continue the emerging series of International Training Workshops which CODATA is seeking to establish with a variety of partners.  Recent training workshops have been held in Beijing, China and in Nairobi, Kenya.

The International Training Workshop will take place at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore, India on 9-20 March 2015. Places for roughly twenty students will be available.

Travel, subsistence and accommodation for participants from India will be provided through ISI. Interested participants should contact Devika P. Madalli <devika[AT]drtc.isibang.ac.in>.

Students from SAARC countries and from other countries in South Asia will be welcome. A limited number of scholarships supporting travel, accommodation and subsistence may be available. Further announcements will be made, however, interested parties should send a brief CV as soon as possible to Simon Hodson <execdir[AT]codata.org> and Devika Madalli <devika[AT]drtc.isibang.ac.in> and you will be contacted about scholarship opportunities.

Further details are provided below…

Objective

The intensive, two week residential course has as its objective to train early and mid-career data professionals in using latest technology and techniques in Big Data management and its exploitation.

Methodology

The workshop will have a carefully designed curriculum to cover the broad introductory topics to data, data handling issues, standards and interoperability – it will consider generic data issues and specific challenges associated with Big Data. In an integrated way, the workshop will combine theoretical topics with practical activities including demonstrations and illustrations, short exercises involving the participants and project work.

Subjects Covered

Topics to be covered by the course, will include the following:

• Introduction – What is Big Data? What are its features?
• Big Data Storage – formats – scaling
• Tools and techniques for handling Big Data [4-8 lectures]
• Standards for Big Data
• Semantics for Big Data organization and retrieval
• Data models and services
• Domain based data
• Open Government Data
• Big Data Licensing: access, use, reuse modalities
• Data and text mining
• Approaches to structured and unstructured data
• Case studies, Big data projects and alliances

Eligible Participants

The workshop is targeted at early and mid-career data professionals.  The definition is deliberately flexible to allow candidates from a variety of backgrounds to make a case.  However, doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, young faculty members and early career data experts, data managers etc are the target group.  Ideal candidates will have some experience as data managers, data encoders, metadata managers, archivers, data exploitation personnel, analysts, data publishers or similar roles. Data experts that help policy makers in data related policies are also included.

This is the sixteenth and final statement is our series from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Sanna Sorvari is a new candidate seeking election to the CODATA Executive Committee.  She is nominated by Finland.

I’m honoured for the opportunity to stand for election to the CODATA Executive Committee. In recent years I have been involved in establishing new Pan-European and national data intensive research infrastructures in the field of environmental and Earth System science. From those activities, I have gained a lot of experiences and insights on multinational and international challenges and opportunities related to research data. As actively working at the national, Nordic, European and global level on scientific data, I consider that I could bring new perspectives and collaboration opportunities for CODATA to liaise with the bodies (such as ESFRI) and organisations that are currently building and setting new data management structures, standard, protocols and data policies.

I’m a member of several boards, committees and projects relevant to CODATA, such as:

• European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Expert Advisory Group on European Research Infrastructures and e-infrastructures – guiding EC on the strategic orientations for future actions related to data and e-infrastructures;
• Belmont Forum’s E-Infrastructures and Data Management Collaborative Research Action to draft recommendations on how the Belmont Forum as an IGFA group can internationally fund and support global environmental change research more coordinated way;
• COOPEUS project (WP leader) – to establish Transatlantic roadmap for Earth system research infrastructures for the next 10 years in related to data and interoperability;
• European ENVRI Environmental Research Infrastructure Stakeholder Advisory Board (chair) – to coordinate and ensure the interoperability among the European environmental research infrastructures;
• Project coordinator of Nordic research infrastructure network – to align the developments and data policies of Nordic environmental RIs;
• and a member of recently established Finnish National Committee on Research Data Management – to bring together national organizations and experts from the field of research data management.

Statement

Even though there are a huge number of initiatives and big investments made to facilitate the modern, data-driven science, only a small fraction of the existing scientific data is used for scientific or any other purposes. Thus, there still seems to be many existing barriers that decrease the applicability of data products and usage. Quite often these barriers are not related to the technical issues but are often related to other perspectives, such as on knowledge (how to discover and access the data), human behaviour (trust), policies (IPRs, licenses,..) and discipline/cultural oriented aspects (e.g. understanding the data).

CODATA has a very central position in the international arena and it’s close connection to ICSU and ICSU’s national committees gives a unique opportunity for CODATA to steer the process for better utilization of the data and removing the barriers around data access, usage and applicability. CODATA should continue to work on increasing the quality, reliability, management and accessibility of data. However, for the following years CODATA should start implementing the recommendations of the CODATA review panel, especially on sharpening the scope of the actions and increasing the visibility of CODATA among global research communities. CODATA should define its role in the international data landscape and to be ready for task sharing and close collaboration with other initiatives. If elected in the executive committee, I’m ready to work towards these goals for CODATA.