This is the fourth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Refiloe Mabaso is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  She was nominated by South Africa.

Refiloe Mabaso is an accomplished senior business leader with over 15 years’ experience that spans the full spectrum in both private and public sector. Areas of specialization include amongst others, Data Management, Information Management, Knowledge Management, Library Management, Records Management and Business Intelligence with a proven record of accomplishment in planning and leading comprehensive information and knowledge management strategies in support of business goals and objectives. Expertise in directing the formation of information and knowledge management tools and steering the execution of information and knowledge sharing programs. Demonstrated success driving growth in information and knowledge management through implementation of key projects. Experience in growing start-up organizations to leading business units and growing teams in large multi-national corporates. Recently have been nominated by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) to participate ON Making It Stick Knowledge Management Research Project, to share and develop a case study on the successful practices to manage KM-related change and engage end users in KM tools, approaches, activities and work which will be published on APQC’s Knowledge Base library.

Holds, among other qualifications a degree in Library and Information Studies – University of South Africa, Management Development Programme – University of South Africa, Postgraduate Certificate in Knowledge Management – University of Pretoria, Masters in Business Administration (MBA) – University of South Africa, International Women in Leadership Programme – Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) and General Manager Programme –  Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS).

Currently working at Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS), Senior Manager- Information and Knowledge Management leading a team of Specialists covering areas of Library Management, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Data Analyst, Business/Market Intelligence and Digital Enterprise Content Management.

Serving as a member of the South Africa CODATA Committee with the objective of promoting CODATA activities and goals in South Africa. Previously served as a member of CODATA Executive Committee. Currently serves as a deputy chairperson of the Knowledge Management South Africa, a society for knowledge management professionals who are passionate about moving their discipline forward in their organizations while investing in themselves. The society supports the research and development of knowledge management practices in both private and public sectors.

This is the third in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Robert J. Hanisch is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by USA

Dr. Hanisch is currently the Director, Office of Data and Informatics at NIST.  He has built that office to be a major force in US data management.  Before joining NIST in 2014, Dr. Hanisch was Director of the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory, a major contributor to innovation in open science and open data.  Over his career Dr. Hanisch has worked in both astronomy and in data, in the US as well as in France and the Netherlands.   At the Space Telescope Science Institute Dr. Hanisch led the development of the Multi-Mission Archive at Space Telescope (MAST), which hosts data from NASA’s optical, UV, and near-IR astrophysics missions.  Since coming to NIST, Bob has participated in the BRDI/US National Committee Meetings.  He has been the chair of the Steering Committee for the US National Data Service, is a past co-chair of the Research Data Alliance Domain Repositories Interest Group and is a member of the leadership team of RDA-US.  He is also a member of the Interagency Working Group on Open Science and is NIST’s representative to CENDI.  Also at NIST, Dr. Hanisch has led efforts in data discovery and preservation, coordinating the development of a new NIST-wide public data repository and deploying data resource registries for materials science, metrology, and greenhouse gases.   He has represented NIST at meetings of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), the international organization that oversees the more than one hundred national metrology institutes around the world.  He has given invited talks on data management at the Materials Research Society, American Astronomical Society, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, and the Earth Science Information Partners.  For CODATA international, Dr. Hanisch has been an active member of the Steering Committee for the Commission on Standards.  He was a key organizer of the Commission meeting held at the Royal Society on 13-15 November 2017.  Dr. Hanisch is involved in national and international issues of reproducibility in science and data as a critical building block for reproducibility.  As a member of the EC, Dr. Hanisch would be an effective contributor to our Frontiers goal and will continue to be actively involved in one of CODATA’s key international initiatives, the Commission on Data Standards (and interoperability). As a leading thinker in US data science development Dr. Hanisch can also make effective contributions to data policies and well as workforce development.

This is the second in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following International Data Week. Simon Cox is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by Austraila

Simon Cox leads the Environmental Information Infrastructure team in CSIRO. With a background in geology and geophysics, he has been working on standards for publication and transfer of earth and environmental science data since the emergence of the world wide web. He has engaged with most areas of environmental science, including water resources, marine data, meteorology, soil, ecology and biodiversity, focusing particularly on cross-disciplinary standards. His current work focuses on aligning science information with the semantic web technologies and linked open data principles, and the formalization, publication and maintenance of controlled vocabularies and similar reference data.

He is principal- or co-author of a number of international standards through Open Geospatial Consortium, ISO, and World Wide Web Consortium, including Geography Markup Language (GML), Observations & Measurements (O&M), the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSN), Time Ontology in OWL (OWL-Time), and the Dataset Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT). These have been broadly adopted internationally. The value of cross-disciplinary standards is to enable data from multiple origins and disciplines to be combined more effectively. He has worked across a variety of technologies and institutions.

Simon has held leadership positions in a number of organizations, including Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (Advisory Board), IUGS Commission for Geoscience Information (Executive Committee), Open Geospatial Consortium (Architecture Board, Planning Committee), Research Data Alliance (Technical Advisory Board), American Geophysical Union (ESSI Executive Board), alongside numerous positions on technical working groups and committees.

He was awarded the Gardels Medal by the Open Geospatial Consortium, and presented the Leptoukh Lecture for the American Geophysical Union. His career at CSIRO has been supplemented by stints teaching at Monash University, and as a senior fellow at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. 

Simon is a member of the team steering the technical side of the CODATA Data Interoperability Initiative, which is using a set of pilot projects to frame the design of some multi-disciplinary data infrastructure. If elected, he would bring a technical practitioner’s perspective to the CODATA Executive Committee, and insights around communities and process gained from his experience in a range of standards organizations.

Additional professional details are available at https://people.csiro.au/C/S/Simon-Cox

This is the first in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections at the General Assembly to be held on 9-10 November in Gaborone, Botswana, following international Data Week. Richard Hartshorn is a candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by IUPAC

Professor Richard Hartshorn, Secretary General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) will make an excellent member of the CODATA Executive Committee. In his role as Secretary General, and through others within IUPAC, he has demonstrated strategic leadership and gained significant experience in governance of an international science-based organization.

As you know, IUPAC has created and maintained a common language for chemistry, for almost one hundred years, via the development of standards in nomenclature, terminology, weights, symbols, etc. Such activities involve reaching international consensus among experts from around the world. In this context, Professor Hartshorn has been involved in nomenclature activities for many years and led the IUPAC Division of Chemical Nomenclature and Structure Representation (2010-13). He is also significantly involved in the International Chemical Identifier (InChI) Trust, both at a governance level as a member of the InChI Trust Board, and in InChI-based projects [the InChI is and will be a key tool in making chemical data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)].

IUPAC is committed to continued innovation in nomenclature, terminology, other intellectual infrastructure, and particularly to developing tools for the use, global exchange, and archiving of digital chemical data. Professor Hartshorn has taken a strategic role in this area, including initiation of work that will lead to development of standards for data repositories, building on the platform of the JCAMP spectral data standard and the InChI. Both JCAMP-DX and InChI are globally-accepted standards currently used in major scientific databases and publications.  We believe that a close working relationship with CODATA will be mutually beneficial as the Missions of both organizations are in alignment – working to support the free exchange of scientific information and facilitating global collaboration for the advancement of scientific discovery.

As the new International Science Council seeks to establish itself across the sciences and social sciences CODATA will inevitably need to move with the times.  It is, however, essential that it carries with it the support of its current constituency and maintains its already high level of respect in scientific data. There will, therefore, be an even greater need to negotiate and balance different demands in a global and diverse arena. Professor Hartshorn has significant experience of this through his work in achieving international consensus in chemical nomenclature and other aspects of IUPAC work.  This requires skills of diplomatic negotiations in situations where a very small staff need to work with a global membership, coping with the limitations of small organizations and yet still maintaining the global impact that satisfies the wider membership.

IUPAC’s interest in digital data standards accelerated in 2013 when Jeremy Frey, the current IUPAC representative to CODATA, put forth a proposal for the creation of a “Digital IUPAC,” recommending that IUPAC develop standards in collaboration with other scientific organizations and governments for the creation of a consistent global framework for Human and Machine-readable (and “understandable”) chemical information.  This proposal resulted in the creation of the IUPAC Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards (CPCDS) whose members have since been involved in collaborative efforts with the Research Data Alliance, the InChI Trust, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Allotrope Foundation, and others, including CODATA. The recent CODATA activities include 1) a joint workshop entitled “Supporting FAIR Exchange of Chemical Data through Standards Development” that was held in Amsterdam 16-17 July and initiated further development work on criteria for spectral data packages and repositories; 2) submission of a proposal for an Inter-Union Workshop and Symposium for SciDataCon 2018 that will focus on data interoperability in chemistry, biology, and crystallography; and 3) IUPAC is taking a lead role in developing a Chemistry Implementation Network as part of the Go FAIR initiative. Professor Hartshorn has been closely involved in and has contributed significantly to these developments.

While IUPAC, through its Divisions and Standing Committees, has other digital data initiatives underway, we listed just a few above to demonstrate our commitment to the development of standards for digital chemical information. Professor Hartshorn is a major force in moving IUPAC forward in this arena. We believe that having an experienced, data-oriented IUPAC Senior Executive serve as a member of the CODATA Executive Committee will reinforce the already strong relationship that exists between our organizations and allow us to collaboratively move forward in building standards for the digital future of science.

Professor Qifeng Zhou                           Bonnie Lawlor                          Professor Jeremy Frey
IUPAC President                                   Chair, IUPAC CPCDS               IUPAC Delegate to CODATA