CODATA (ICSU’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology) and the ICSU World Data System are collaborating to organise a joint conference, SciDataCon 2014 in New Delhi on 2-5 November 2014.  

Highlighting the theme of ‘Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability’, this will be a major international conference addressing various issues relating to data and international research.

CODATA and WDS invite applications for expert members of the International Scientific Programme Committee.  Further details are below and in a pdf attachement SciDataCon2014_ISPC_Nomination_Letter.  Please submit applications no later than 14 February 2014 using the online form.

SciDataCon 2014: Invitation for International Scientific Programme Committee Candidates

Below is the text of the Call for Candidates issues jointly by CODATA and ICSU-WDS.

Dear Colleagues,

Data are essential to all scientific endeavours. The emerging cultures of data sharing and publication, open access to, and reuse of data are positive signs of an evolving research environment. Nevertheless, several cultural and technological challenges are still preventing the scientific and research community from realizing the full benefits of these trends.

The Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and the World Data System (WDS), interdisciplinary bodies of the International Council for Science (ICSU) are supporting and encouraging these positive changes by actively promoting effective data policies and good data management practices in the scientific and research community, to produce better science, which ultimately benefits society. Likewise, the challenges and opportunities of ‘Big Data’ may have ramifications for the conduct of science: the value and importance of data are being recognized more than ever before.

As a major contribution to this effort, the two organizations are co-sponsoring and organizing a high profile international biennial conference on scientific research data. SciDataCon 2014 will provide a unique platform bringing together international experts and practitioners in data sciences, technologies and management; researchers from the natural, social, health and computer sciences, and from the humanities; research funders; policy makers and advisors.

The sustainability challenges facing society today cannot be solved without multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on global sustainability that requires the use, sharing and integration of data across scientific disciplines and domains and from international sources. The effectiveness and credibility of this research will rely on the availability to the scientific and research community of quality-assessed and interoperable datasets.

To facilitate the work of international research undertakings—including the Future Earth international research programme on global sustainability launched by ICSU and its partners in 2014—and amplify the message of like-minded global data initiatives promoting data sharing and interoperability—including the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the recently established Research Data Alliance (RDA)—SciDataCon 2014 will highlight the theme of Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability.

The conference will take place on 2–5 November 2014 in New Delhi, India and will be hosted by the Indian National Science Academy. With high-level keynotes, a mix of plenary and parallel sessions, and a stimulating poster session, SciDataCon is conceived as a focussed—yet inclusive—conference to address the issues most important to the global scientific and research community as they pertain to data and information. The International Scientific Programme Committee will play a key role in implementing the scientific programme with innovative online consultation and input from research and data science communities worldwide.

We invite applications for expert members of the International Scientific Programme Committee.  Please submit applications no later than 14 February 2014 using the online form available here.

Huadong GUO, President, CODATA, and Bernard Minster, Chair, ICSU World Data System

Enquiries:  secretariat@scidatacon2014.org

Conference Website: www.SciDataCon2014.org

Last week at the 10th Plenary of GEO (the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations), CODATA played a lead role in organizing a side event of the GEO Data Sharing Working Group (DSWG).  Entitled, Implementation of Data Sharing Principles, the side event had two principal aims: first, to showcase the progress, current activities and priorities of the DSWG; and second, to provide examples of how national, regional and international capacities for data sharing are being developed and extended.

It was notable during the week – and not just in the DSWG meeting and side event – that the GEO community views the advancement of data sharing as one of its tangible success areas.  GEO’s mission is to build an interoperable Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) that will yield a broad range of societal benefits.  The availability of data shared by governments and participating organizations and programmes is fundamental to achieving this mission.  As the GEOSS Implementation Plan declares, ‘The societal benefits of Earth observations cannot be achieved without data sharing’.

Barbara Ryan (GEO Secretariat Director), Jose Miguel Rubio Iglesias (EC), Catherine Doldirina (EC Joint Research Centre) at the DSWG Side Event

Nevertheless, as Barbara Ryan, GEO’s new Secretariat Director, remarked in opening the DSWG Side Event, much remains to be done.  The GEO Community and the DSWG should keep advocating for Open Data principles and practice.  It is also important for GEO to demonstrate the benefits of Open Data.  These can be economic: as Barbara observed in her recent TED-X talk, just the data underpinning a recent Spanish mapping and analysis of forestation would have cost more than 320M dollars if the US were still charging for LandSat data.  It is this type of benefit, she declared, that makes her passionate about data sharing issues.

Greg Withee, the U.S. co-chair of the DSWG, called for improved monitoring and evaluation of the use of GEO datasets, so that the benefits can be more easily demonstrated, and that the effect of restrictions can be analysed and understood.

The Open Data agenda has come a long way and its advocates have made considerable ground, witness the G8 Open Data Charter.  GEO and the DSWG need to move in step with such advances.  Indeed, as was argued by a number of speakers, GEO as a voluntary intergovernmental organisation is well positioned to advance Open Data approaches even further, for example, by building consensus and developing practical Open Data implementations.

Catherine Doldirina, of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, explored the challenge presented by the lack of ‘legal interoperability’.  Legal interoperability is inhibited when a restrictive license on a data input ‘infects’ an aggregated or derivative data product.  To avoid this problem, Catherine urged GEO Members and Participating Organisations to make datasets available with as few restrictions as possible.  Similarly, GEO needs to further promote the use of fully open and interoperable licenses.  She argued that GEO should adopt Open Data principles for the GEO Data-CORE and elevate this to the default standard of sharing data within GEOSS.  An ad hoc subgroup of the DSWG is exploring possible revisions to the GEO Data Sharing Principles for consideration by the GEO community, potentially including a more explicit endorsement of Open Data principles.

A highlight of the side event was a panel of 8 speakers on the issue of capacity building, organized and moderated by Robert Chen, one of the DSWG co-chairs and former CODATA Secretary-General. Some of the panel presentations focused on examples of new and emerging data policies to foster data sharing: e.g., that of the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 research programme; that of the EC’s Copernicus research programme; the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Data Policy for Earth Observations; proposed changes to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Data Policy to encourage greater availability of data; and the Open Data initiative of the World Bank launched in 2010, which has led to a 10-fold increase in the use of World Bank data. DSWG co-chair Michel Schouppe of the EC reported that the Open Data requirements of Horizon 2020 are still being piloted but are now obligatory for some parts of the programme. Greg Scott of the United Nations Initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) described a number of data sharing efforts in the geospatial community, including discussions with the International Bar Association about a proposed Convention on Geoinformation.

Chinese delegates at the ChinaGEO stand, with Liu Chuang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in the centre of the front row. http://www.iisd.ca/geo/geox/17jan.html

Other panel presentations examined how data sharing principles are being put into practice at national and regional levels.  Liu Chuang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (and past CODATA Prize winner) listed the recent contributions of China in this regard.  She also highlighted the work of the CODATA PASTD Task Group, which inter alia will be holding a major workshop in Nairobi, Kenya this summer to examine the implications and implementation of data sharing principles for developing countries.

Derek Hanekom, South African Minister of Science and Technology, with GEO participants from Africa at the AfriGEOSS Stand http://www.iisd.ca/geo/geox/

Ganiy Agbaje, DSWG member from Nigeria, described the plans of AfriGEOSS to build data sharing capacity in Africa.  AfriGEOSS will provide coordination and a means for African countries to participate to a greater extent in GEO and develop data sharing capacity.

The closing panel discussion focused on the challenge of incentivising Open Data.  The mandates of funded programmes are one thing, but even these only go so far.  More incentive needs to come from the downstream benefits – whether the direct economic benefit of third party services build on Open Data or the benefits to be achieved through addressing (for example) GEO’s Societal Benefit Areas on the basis of improved access to data, information and services.  As DSWG co-chair Paul Uhlir observes, quoted in a recent piece in SciDevNet, ‘Open data policies are much more economically generative than closed ones.’

Presenters Chu Ishida (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Catherine Doldirina (EC Joint Research Centre)

Recognising the important ongoing contributions of the GEO Data Sharing Working Group, CODATA was delighted not only to contribute to organizing the side event, but also to sponsor a reception (as it has in many previous GEO side events), enabling discussion and networking to continue over refreshments, wine and hors d’oeuvres.

Presenters Daniel Quintart (EC), Liu Chuang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and DSWG Member Ambinintsoa Noasilalaonomenj Anahary (Madagascar)

This blog post was written by Robert Chen and Simon Hodson.  Photo credits to Robert Chen where there is no link to the IISD Highlights Report.

I was in the Hague yesterday (Monday 20 January) for a meeting with DANS and the 3TU Data.Centrum.  It was a generously accorded opportunity for me to communicate plans for the future of CODATA and discuss membership.  I have worked a lot with Dutch colleagues over the past few years in the context of Knowledge Exchange and I think some inspiring work is going on in the Netherlands.  In particular, I am impressed by the partnership of these two organisations in Research Data Netherlands and also in the way DANS and 3TU have aimed to respond to the Riding the Wave report to develop a partnership and a federated data infrastructure based upon the distribution of back office and front office functions.

The occasion for this visit was an excellent symposium by DANS visiting fellows, Andrew Treloar @atreloar and Herbert van der Sompel @hvdsomp, on Riding the Wave and The Scholarly Archive of the Future.  The joint presentation, and the structured discussions, were the result of ten days of dedicated thinking and working together.

@atreloar presents dimensions of change in scholarly practice and communications.

Andrew and Herbert took as a starting point four functions of research communication suggested by Rosendaal and Geurts in 1997: registration, certification, awareness and archiving.  They analysed changes in each of these functions and came up with a typology characterising dimensions of change in scholarly practice and communications.  The key features of these changes are an increasing variety in the object of communication and a disaggregation of the processes that comprise communication – particularly of those, perhaps, that perform the registration, ‘certification’ and awareness functions in the Rosendaal/Geurts typology.

@hvdsomp presents the emerging ‘recording’ and ‘archiving’ infrastructure

The implications of this for ‘recording’ and ‘archiving’ infrastructure were represented in a diagram.  The challenge for data archives is to interface and interoperate effectively with new, emerging, disaggregated systems for scholarly communication, filtering, and annotation – while retaining (and sustaining) the necessary archiving functions.

Andrew and Herbert were clear that this work was ‘thinking in progress’.  Indeed, I think that was what made the event so interesting.  It was genuinely refreshing to engage with some relatively unhindered and untethered thinking.  Moreover, it was imaginative and bold for the event to be organised in such a way, in the conviction that colleagues from DANS, 3TU Data.Centrum and others involved in data archiving need to imagine the archive of the future and would benefit in this from the insights of invited experts who had been given time to think…

This post is by Bob Chen, Director of CIESIN (Center for International Earth Science Information Network), Columbia University, former Secretary General of CODATA and current co-chair of the GEO Data Sharing Working Group.

Representatives of more than 80 governments and 100 participating organizations are gathering in Geneva this week to renew their commitment to GEO, the Group on Earth Observations, a voluntary intergovernmental initiative launched in 2005, and to agree on plans for the next decade. A key aspect of GEO has been to widen the consensus on the need for open sharing of Earth Observation and related spatial data and to implement data sharing mechanisms within GEOSS, the Global Earth Observing System of Systems.

CODATA has played a leadership role in GEO’s data sharing efforts since 2006. The GEOSS 10-year implementation plan adopted in 2005 had outlined a set of Data Sharing Principles (DSPs) for data sharing across the GEO community, but translating these principles into practice required agreement on terminology, consensus on processes and procedures, and inputs from experts on legal and intellectual property issues. As an interdisciplinary committee of the International Council for Science (ICSU), which was and still is a GEO Participating Organization, CODATA volunteered to lead the initial data sharing task and organized an expert meeting at its 2006 CODATA Conference in Beijing. In 2007, CODATA led development of a white paper that reviewed past experience with data sharing principles and policies and drafted specific guidelines for implementing the DSPs. Based in part on these efforts, the 2007 Ministerial Summit in Cape Town affirmed the need to reach a consensus on the implementation of the DSPs by the next Ministerial in 2010.

The 2008 GEO-V Plenary in Bucharest elevated the original GEO data sharing task to a higher-level Task Force with a mix of governmental and Participating Organization members. CODATA continued to represent ICSU as one of the co-chairs of the Data Sharing Task Force, and played a key role in revising the proposed implementation guidelines. In September 2009, a version of the white paper, Toward Implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems Data Sharing Principles, authored by Paul Uhlir, myself, Joanne Gabrynowicz, and Katleen Janssen, was simultaneously published in the CODATA Data Science Journal and the Journal of Space Law. The paper provided detailed justification for the GEOSS Implementation Guidelines that were subsequently accepted at the GEO-VI Plenary in Washington DC in November 2009.

Recognizing that implementation guidelines were only a partial step towards implementation of the GEOSS DSPs, GEO recognized that more specific actions needed to be taken by GEO collectively, by individual Members and Participating Organizations, and by specific GEOSS tasks and cross-cutting activities to move towards full and open access to key data within GEOSS. The Task Force therefore developed a detailed Action Plan that was adopted at the GEO-VII Plenary in Beijing in 2010. A key element of the Action Plan was for GEO to create the GEOSS Data-CORE—the GEOSS Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone—consisting of a distributed pool of documented datasets, contributed by the GEO community on the basis of full and open unrestricted access and at no more than the cost of reproduction and distribution. The Action Plan also identified a range of other implementation actions and established a Data Sharing Working Group (DSWG) to continue the work of the Task Force.

CODATA continues to play a lead role in the DSWG, serving as one of six co-chairs, contributing substantial expertise on issues such as legal interoperability and data sharing frameworks, and helping to organize side events and other supporting activities. With the end of the first 10-year implementation period in sight, and in light of rapidly growing recognition by governments and the wider community of the benefits of open data sharing, there is increasing awareness within the GEO community to the potential not only to further implement the existing GEOSS DSPs but also to expand the range of open data sharing efforts across a range of societal benefit areas.

The DSWG has organized a side event at the GEO-X Plenary that is highlighting a number of new data sharing initiatives and improvements in capacity for data sharing at national, regional, and global levels. Simon Hodson and I are also members of the ICSU delegation at the GEO-X Plenary. I will be working with Simon to report on the side event in more detail and on outcomes of the GEO-X Plenary and Ministerial Summit related to data sharing in upcoming blog entries.

Under the name SciDataCon 2014, the next CODATA International Conference will take place in New Delhi, India on 2-5 November 2014.

Research data is at the core of the scientific endeavour, but several cultural and technological challenges are still preventing the research community from realising the full benefits. The emerging cultures of data sharing and publication, open access to, and reuse of data are the positive signs of an evolving research environment.

Under the umbrella of the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and the World Data System (WDS) are supporting and encouraging these positive changes by actively promoting effective data policies and good data management practices in the research community, to produce better science, which ultimately benefits society.

As a major contribution to this effort, the two organizations have decided to co-sponsor and organize a high profile international biennial conference on scientific research data. SciDataCon will provide a unique platform bringing together international experts and practitioners in data management and technologies, researchers from the natural sciences and social sciences, research funders, and policy makers.

The sustainability challenges facing society today cannot be solved without multidisciplinary and transdiscplinary research on global sustainability, which requires the use of data across scientific disciplines and domains and from international sources. The effectiveness and credibility of this research will rely on the availability to the research community of quality-assessed and interoperable datasets.

In order to facilitate the work of international research undertakings—including the Future Earth research programme on global sustainability launched by ICSU and its partners in 2014— and amplify the message of like-minded global data initiatives promoting data sharing and interoperability—including the Group on Earth Observations and the Research Data Alliance—SciDataCon 2014 will highlight the theme of Data haring and Integration for Global Sustainability.

With high-level keynotes, four parallel sessions and a stimulating poster session, SciDataCon is conceived as a focussed—yet inclusive—conference to address major issues in global data management. The scientific programme will be designed by an International Scientific Programme Committee with innovative online consultation and input from research and data communities worldwide.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this exciting conference planned on 2–5 November 2014 in New Delhi, India and hosted by the Indian National Science Academy.  More information, calls for papers and invitations to participate in discussions around the themes of the conference will appear soon at http://www.scidatacon2014.org