Author Archives: codata_blog

Humans of Data 1

img_3656_small“I think you need to express yourself the way you feel you should, because what really matters at this conference is that we’re all interested in making data available, accessible and preserving it, and we shouldn’t feel that we have to sacrifice who we are in part or whole, in order to do our work.

I hear far more people who are complimentary about the way I dress than not, so it’s not like it’s problematic. But it shouldn’t matter anyway. We have to just keep being who we are, and the other people will catch up.”

Humans of Data

At events like International Data Week, much discussion has happened around the technical and legislative challenges and opportunities relating to research data. But in many presentations and group meetings, we have repeatedly heard that our human behaviour – our desires, ambitions, fears, traditions and habits – shape how effectively we create, manage, share and reuse research data assets, and how open we are to collaborating on research data infrastructure.  As many speakers have noted, the technical challenges are usually susceptible to scoping and tackling, but the really intricate work is the work of creating social change and new behaviours.

As an artist and a researcher, I’m passionate about digital curation, digital preservation and research data management, and how those skills are useful to everyone in contemporary society to one extent or another.  And I’m also passionate about the way that research data – and visual art – have so much potential to transform our lives, societies and the world around us.  As I’ve continued to attend data-related conferences, I’ve become fascinated with this human element. I also noted that the International Data Week crowd is a welcome mix of nationalities, genders, ages and ethnicities.  It’s critical that our conversations include people unlike ourselves, and there is so much to be gained from getting to know each other better in order to build the kinds of relationships that can help us make progress across communities, nationalities and disciplines.

To that end, I launched a project called “Humans of Data’. It’s a really simple idea – basically the same as the ‘Humans of New York’ project online, where there is a photo and a quote from each (unnamed) person.  I hope this helps to get a more personal, human conversation going amongst the amazing people I meet at data conferences all over the world, connecting with their lives as individuals and having them say something about what they’re passionate about when it comes to data-related issues.

I’ll be posting the ‘Humans of Data’ here on the CODATA blog as each photo and quote becomes available. If you’d like to view them as a group, please click the ‘Humans of Data’ category to group these posts together. If you’d like to participate, please email me at laura.molloy AT oii.ox.ac.uk, or contact me via Twitter @LM_HATII.

Looking forward to our collaboration!

Scidatacon: Opening keynotes

It was a pleasure to start off the first full day of SciDataCon with a keynote from Elaine M Faustman, Professor and Director at the Institute for Risk Analysis and Risk Communication, University of Washington and member of the ICSU World Data System Scientific Committee.  Professor Faustman’s keynote talk, ‘Challenges and Opportunities with Citizen Science:  How a decade of opening1experiences have shaped our forward paths’, introduced a welcome early focus on the importance of rigorous ethical approaches to ‘citizen science’ research projects. Looking back to the early roots of the knowledge practices we now call ‘science’, Faustman reminded us that of course the roots of these practices can be found in the work of European gentleman scientists and their cabinets of curiosities.   She also situated contemporary citizen science practice in the US legislatory framework of the US citizen’s right to know, work which has been underpinned by standards and acts since the 1940s onwards.

Reflecting over a decade of citizen science practice in the environment and public health domains, Faustman provided examples of projects where citizens are not only research subjects but are centrally influential in the work, to the point where they express ownership of the project alongside the university team.  Discussion focused on the importance of the abilty of research participants to influence the direction and scope of the research project, to provide feedback on its progress, and to have access to the data accrued in order to be able – in case of public health projects at least – to use it to guide their ownopening4 decision-making.  The message of deep ethical engagement and building respectful relationships with participants set the scene for a day in which ethical issues reverberated.

The second keynote was by Simon Cox, Research Scientist, Environmental Informatics, CSIRO Land and Water, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia.  In his talk, ‘What does that symbol mean? – controlled vocabularies and vocabulary services’, Cox raised a very pragmatic point about the widespread problem of non-systematic use of symbols – and keywords – in data.  He demonstrated that we assume symbols and keywords have some sort of shared meaning, at least in a given community, but that the reality is much less systematic. Symbols and abbreviations with no widely used consistent meaning are often used by researchers when creating data. Populaopening6r terms describing volume can mean entirely different things in different countries.  And even symbols of terms describing a widely understood measurement, such as the metre, can be problematic link to a common source: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures provides a definition, which can be found via a given URI. But the fact that this URI has changed regularly from year to year disrupts any expectation of a stable, enduring location for this definition.

Cox suggested a couple of actions to mitigate this situation. Firstly, a new CODATA task group on coordinating data standards will take this work forward. Secondly, the Global Agricultural Concept Scheme – GACS – is the result of three defining sources from agricultural research banding together to deduplicate their respective vocabularies and make them interoperable for agricultural researchers. Cox noted that the technical job is not large but that – in confluence with Faustman’s earlier message – the really big job is achieving the buy-in from the community in question.

So the pesky human dimension appears right at the start of International Data Week!  More information on the keynotes is at http://www.scidatacon.org/site/opening-keynote/

Laura Molloy is a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. She is on Twitter at @LM_HATII.

How to Address Data Challenges in the Biomedical field: Solutions for Data Access, Sharing and Reuse

Irene Pasquetto is a PhD Student in Information Studies at UCLA.

As scientists in the biomedical fields are generating more and more diverse data, the real elaine-m-faustmanquestion today is not only how to make data “sharable” or “open”, but also, and especially, useful and reusable. At Scidatacon 2016, speakers from funding agencies, research universities, data research institutions, and the publishing industry came together to try to address this key question.

Around 20 highly interdisciplinary papers organized in four busy sessions addressed the problem from different perspectives, while agreeing on an essential point: developing new, open frameworks and guidelines is not enough. Indeed, what characterized this last edition of Scidatacon was a focus on proposing and discussing applicable solutions that can address the management, use, and reuse of large scale datasets in biomedicine today, right now.

Three main themes emerged across the sessions:img_20160912_125708

  1. How to enable scientific reproducibility.
  2. How to apply data science techniques to biological research.
  3. How to make heterogeneous bio-databases globally interoperable.

#1 HOW TO ENABLE SCIENTIFIC REPRODUCIBILITY

Leslie McIntosh (Director, Center for Biomedical Informatics Washington University in St. Louis) moderated session 1, which focused on the first topic: Solving the problem of reproducibility in science, starting from making jennie-larkin-biomedical-data-stewardshipbiomedical data reusable to this end.

Tim Errington (Center for Open Science) offered a clear and useful distinction between reproducibility, which he defined as the possibility of re-running the experiment the way it was originally conducted, and replicability, which is the possibility of getting the same results by reusing the same methods of data collection and analysis with novel data. Errington invited the audience to reflect on two main issues: first, incentives for individual success are focused on “getting it  published, not getting it right,” and second, instead of focusing on problems with either open access or open data, we should think about “open workflows” that include the whole process of scientific research.

Similarly, Anthony Juehne (Washington University in St. Louis) talked about how to address reproducibility issues step by step across the entire “scientific workflow”. Juehne presented to possible solution to the problem: “Wrap, Link, and Cite” data products OR “Contain and Visualize” them using virtual machines.

Finally, Cynthia Hudson Vitale exposed a rarely addressed aspect in the reproducibility community, which is the fundamental role played by biocurators. While their work is often not acknowledged in the community, biocurators are those who de-facto do the hard job of cleaning and organizing the data in a way that can be used to reproduce experiments. Cynthia proposed some concrete solutions to the problem. First, domain reproducibility articles need to include a greater variety of curation treatments. And, second, curators need to publish in domain journals to ensure the full breadth of curation treatments is discussed with researchers.

#2 HOW TO APPLY DATA SCIENCE TECHNIQUES TO BIOLOGY RESEARCH

A second main theme that emerged in session 2 was how to apply recent statistical and jiawei-han-large-scale-biological-text-mining-and-data-analysis jiawei-han-panel-large-scale-biological-text-mining-and-data-analysiscomputational cutting-edge techniques for data science (machine learning algorithms, deep learning text mining) to the biomedical knowledge discovery process. Introduced and moderated by Jiawei Han (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), computer scientists, biologists and biomedical researchers working on biological text mining presented overviews and surveys on the topic.

Beth Sydney Linas and Wendy Nilsen from IIS, the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (NSF – National Cancer Moonshot), gave an overview of how data science can be used to uncover the underlying mechanisms that drive cancer and the development of methods that will allow clinical researchers to eliminate the disease. The researchers concluded that the future of novel computing (especially machine learning, artificial intelligence, network analysis, database mining as well as bioinformatics and image analysis) needs to be directed also as it relates to health related research.

Elaine M. Faustman (University of Washington) presented an annotated database of DNA and protein sequences derived from environmental sequences showing AR in laboratory experiments. The database aims to help fulfill the current lack of knowledge on the relations between antibiotics resistant genes present in the environment and genomic sequences derived from clinical antibiotic resistant isolates.

Jiawei Han, Heng Ji, Peipei Ping, Wei Wang presented results from their analysis of massive collection of biomedical texts from medical research literature using semi-supervised text mining. The researchers argued that interesting biological entities and relationships that are currently “lost” in unstructured data can be efficiently re-discovered by applying bio-text mining techniques to PubMed massive biological text corpus.

# 3 HOW TO MAKE HETEROGENEOUS BIO-DATABASES GLOBALLY INTEROPERABLE

Finally, over 10 presenters in session 3 and 4 shared their own first hand experiences in susanna-assunta-sansone-biomedical-data-stewardshipmanaging and building biomedical integrated databases and making them interoperable. The biomedical research community and funders seek to make their research resources “FAIR”: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, and also seek to strengthen incentives to support improved data stewardship by addressing incentives, such as data citation. Speakers shared a common concern: how to create data standards and practices from the bottom-up. As suggested by the speakers, it is necessary to be aware of existing local, cultural and social incentives, clearly define possible audiences, and involve the scientists in the database-building process. Individual projects can be consulted at the sessions’ webpage: http://www.scidatacon.org/2016/sessions/34/

The Data-At-Risk Task Group (DAR-TG) In Expansive Mood

This post comes from Elizabeth Griffin, chair of the Data at Risk Task Group

Where did we go? Boulder. What did we get? Bolder! When did we get it? Now!! (or, to be precise, dar-workshop10-09-2016this past week, Sept 8–9). What will we do? MAke Things Happen!!!

Over 50 of us were able to drop everything and get to NCAR in Boulder (CO, USA) for a 2-day Workshop on the Rescue of Data At Risk (defined as raw or meagerly-reduced data in non-electronic or primitive digital media and formats, often with separated or insufficient metadata, and all without promise of adequate preservation). We came from most quarters of the globe: Tasmania, South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Italy and England, as well as from Canada and the USA itself. Graciously hosted by NCAR at its Center Green site, and generously sponsored by the RDA, Elsevier and the Sloan Foundation, this Workshop was without doubt a scene of Work, demanding the full attention of everyone through 5 organized 1-hour break-out sessions to discuss the 5 themes of the meeting: (1) locating (and often rescuing) “at risk” data, (2) preserving them for the longer term, (3) digitizing them, (4) adding (and preserving) necessary metadata, and (5) depositing and disseminating the end products appropriately. Oral case studies and reports set the individual scenes, and numerous posters provided additional thought-provoking materials. We all “worked”, and we all scrutinized what was being offered before “shopping”, and at the end of the two days our boldness had seen true growth.

Parallel responses to questions posed to each break-out group are now furnishing input to on-line Guidelines for Rescuing Data At Risk, which DAR-TG will produce, and prompted ideas for the reference handbook (just a little further down the line) which will also be prepared.

Our determination to “MAke Things Happen” also engendered commitments (1) to run sub-TG groups with specific foci on (a) metadata, (b) catalogues of at-risk data rescued or to-be rescued and (c) the location and preservation of hardware (aka tape-readers and their ilk) and science- specific software, (2) to organize “regional” workshops as a means to engage the great many other interested parties which are also “out there”, and (3) to fund and appoint an early-career Fellow to coordinate a TG-wide investigation of a specific them (tbd, possibly “Water in the World”) where just about every facet of “at-risk” data, from the earth’s atmosphere down to its fossils, has invaluable evidence to contribute.

These plans will of course take time and effort, and some of them resources too, and even formulating them was itself quite exhausting (despite the scrumptious refreshments and meals created and served by the bountiful UCAR kitchen), but our “demonstration” proved without doubt that consolidating and proliferating our re-channelled ideas and objectives will and must be MAde To Happen. The ultimate humanitarian benefits, even just in the domain of meteorology in tropical countries, as featured in the heart-rending details given by Rick Crouthamel’s Public Lecture on “A World Heritage in Peril”, will be more than ample rewards.

We bolder on!

Eugene Eremchenko: Candidacy for CODATA Executive Committee

This is the seventeen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Eugene Eremchenko is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by WDS

The main area of interest of Eugene Eremchenko is in fundamental geospatial issues: new codata_een_photo_400_600trends in cartography, the Situation Awareness concept, net-centricity, geospatial aspects of decision making, the theory of signs (semiotics). The new data era requires new methods in cartography and new ways of working with geodata. This belief is shared by many scientist. It is rightly called the the  ‘Geospatial Revolution’. The core concept of this revolution is that of the ‘Digital Earth’.

Eugene Eremchenko gave first intentional definition of Neogeography (2008), made first Russian open 3D-model of real cities (2005-2007). He formulated the paradox associated with the ‘signless’ perception of space (‘netcentricity paradox’, 2011)’ and proposed the concept of ‘zero sign’ for solving this paradox. Also he is one of co-authors of periodical tables of maps and methods of scientific visualization, as well as the concept of ‘superholography’ (2015-2016).

Eugene Eremchenko is the Head of Neogeography R&D Group (Protvino, Russia), a scientific researcher in Lomonosov Moscow State University (Moscow, Russia), scientific directior of Technopark Protvino (Protvino, Russia). Eugene Eremchenko is the secretary of the ICA commission ‘GIS for Sustainable Development’ (since 2015). He is an elected member of the council of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) (since 2016) and co-chair of the Outreach Committee of ISDE. Also he is known in Russia as a popular geospatial blogger.

Eugene Eremchenko belivies that CODATA’s philosophy is very similar to the ideas behind the ‘geospatial revolution’. The new era of science and technology requires a new concept of scientific data. Developing of this new concept and the sharing of CODATA’s vision will be the focus of the scientific activities of Eugene Eremchenko in the future.

Muliaro Wafula: Candidacy for CODATA Executive Committee

This is the sixteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Muliaro Wafula is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the Kenya CODATA National Committee

I am a Kenyan nationality who has served Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) for 23 years. I am currently a member and the Chair of CODATA Kenya. I am a member of the following:

  1. Editorial board of the Data Science Journal;
  2. Editorial board of the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development;
  3. Committee of the AFRICA-ai-JAPAN Project Taskforce Project sponsored by JICA;
  4. Training committee of the National Industrial Training Authority-Kenya;
  5. Committee of the United Nations SDGs Agricultural and Climate Change Pillars of Kenya.

I coordinate all ICT related Memorandum of Understanding between JKUAT and partners. I have served in the past as the ICT Director for 5 years and director of the Institute of Computer Science and Information Technology for 4 years.

I hold B.Sc. Science (Hons) (Kenyatta University), M.Sc Physics (University of Nairobi), M.Phil. Microelectronic Engineering and Semiconductor Physics (University of Cambridge –UK), Summer Doctoral Programme (Berkman Centre for Internet & Society/Oxford Internet Institute’s -Harvard University Law School), and PhD Information Technology (JKUAT).

I am a recipient of two IBM awards namely: the 2016 IBM Shared University Research Award on Open Data Cloud Project for JKUAT that has enabled JKUAT to be a frontier on building an open data platform for researchers in Africa, and the 2014 IBM MEA Award, for capacity building in Mobile Application development that enable JKUAT train and professionally certify a large number of application developers.

I am professionally certified in various fields including Cyber Security, Mobile Application, ISO/IEC 27001:2005 Information Security Management System, Leadership and Management capacity Development, Sage Accpac ERP Financial and Operations Management Systems, and ISO 9001:2000 on Quality Management Systems.

I am a fellow of the Computer Society of Kenya and the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. I have published a book see link at https://www.amazon.com/ICT-Policy-Strategies-Government-Sustainable/dp/3639515137  and several research papers in peer reviewed international journals. I have attended and participated in several data science, big data and open data trainings, workshops and conferences.

I am an Associate Professor of the Department of Computing at JKUAT and the founder Director of the ICT Centre of Excellence and Open Data (iCEOD). As the director of iCEOD, for the past one year, I have managed to accomplish the following key activities in line with CODATA objectives:

  1. Development and implementation of the JKUAT Open Research Data (JORD) Policy. This policy is now regarded as a frontier in Kenya and a reference for other research institutions to spur data revolution in Kenya and the region;
  2. Design and implementation of a cloud-based value chain open data platform developed based on open data principles and standards in order to promote research data storage, preservation, sharing and reuse. The platform aims at:
    1. Promoting conformity to the open data principles, policies and standards.
    2. Linking and be linked to other open data platforms
    3. Offering data analytic and visualization tools
    4. Supporting and enable ICT Policies and strategies research for open development at postgraduate level.
    5. Enabling use of research data to accelerate achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Kenya and the region
    6. Establishing a call centre
    7. Creating an ecosystem of strictly research data.

The establishment of iCEOD played a leading role in getting JKUAT declared by the Kenyan Ministry of Higher Education Science and Technology, as the the ICT Centre of Excellence for the Northern Corridor Integration Project (NCIP) see link http://www.nciprojects.org/ that involves Kenya, Uganda. Rwanda and Southern Sudan.

If elected as a member of committee of CODATA, I will continue to promote CODATA activities and goals. I will contribute to the strategy of increasing CODATA national membership through the Pan African University Institute of Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation see link at http://www.jkuat.ac.ke/pauisti/  community that is hosted at my university JKUAT. Now that I am engaged in open data and data science research, and also having the experience of leading JKUAT to develop and implement both the open research data policy (JORD) and an open data platform, see link at https://opendata.jkuat.ac.ke/ , I am ready to share lessons learnt and possible best practices to be adopted through offering technical advice to CODATA community that need it. I am currently supervising seven PhD students researching on open data and data science solutions towards achievement of SDGs in developing countries.

Paul Arthur Berkman: Candidacy for CODATA Executive Committee

This is the fifteen in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Paul Arthur Berkman is a new candidate for the CODATA Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member.  He was nominated by the World Data System (WDS), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and the Future Earth program of the International Council of Science. 

Paul Arthur Berkman has been a contributor to CODATA since 2004 and served as co-chair for Paul Arthur Berkmanthe first SciDataCon.  He is nominated by the World Data System (WDS), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and the Future Earth program of the International Council of Science.

KNOWLEDGE IS THE COMMON WEALTH OF HUMANITY.  These words were shared during my first CODATA meeting (Berlin, 2004) and they resonate still as a responsibility to contribute to the world we live in.   Data are at the base of the pyramid toward knowledge and wisdom, underlying the decisions we make for our global sustainability.  This impression was reinforced during my time at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in 2005.

At the 2006 CODATA meeting in Beijing, it became apparent to me that data integration across the International Council for Science could be enhanced, especially with complementary bodies like CODATA and the system of World Data Centers that originated with the International Geophysical Year (now the World Data System – WDS).  Nearly a decade later, I had the pleasure and honour to co-chair the scientific committee for the first International Conference for Data Sharing and Integration for Global Sustainability (SciDataCon) in New Delhi, forming an important bridge between CODATA and WDS.

As a member of the CODATA Executive Committee I will bring global insights from extensive experiences on all seven continents blended with interdisciplinary expertise ranging from oceanography to informatics and science diplomacy.  These experiences include wintering in Antarctica, where I conducted SCUBA research with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the age of 22, leading to a Visiting Professorship at the University of California Los Angeles where I taught Antarctic Marine Ecology and Policy the following year.   This course eventually emerged into the Antarctic Treaty Searchable Database that was used by the Antarctica Treaty System for three years, leading to other information technology projects with federal agencies in the United States.   As a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the University of Cambridge, I convened the first formal dialogue between NATO and Russia regarding security in the Arctic (reflected by Environmental Security in the Arctic Ocean, which has nearly 40,000 downloads), evolving further into international Arctic sustainability programs that I now coordinate through the Belmont Forum and International Institute for Applied Systems Analyses as Professor of Practice in Science Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Global issues of sustainability and data underlie my interest to contribute to CODATA.  During my two-year term, I will focus on data-synthesis efficiencies to address global sustainability questions shared by the Future Earth program through the International Council of Science and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) program through the United Nations.  Both of these decadal programs emerged in 2015 with global remits and there is opportunity to create synergies between them across the natural and social sciences, helping to balance environmental protection, economic prosperity and societal well-being in response to the urgencies of today and in view the needs of future generations.  Data, especially satellite observations that provide synoptic coverage on a planetary scale, are fundamental to Future Earth and the SDG with their common goals of global sustainability.

I will serve as a focal point between the CODATA Executive Committee and the Data Task Force of Future Earth.  I also will continue to create practical collaborations between CODATA and WDS, recognizing that our generation has unique capacity to leverage ‘big data’ solutions into transformative information-management and knowledge-discovery architectures.  Most importantly, I will contribute passion, creativity and holistic integration skills with sense of responsibility as your representative on the CODATA Executive Committee.

CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science

NIHARIKA GUJELAThis post was written by Niharika Gujela, who has a B.Tech in IT from Delhi Technological University, India. Niharika recently attended the CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science, hosted at ICTP, near Trieste, Italy – her participation was kindly supported by ICTP and TWAS.

This post is a syndicated copy of the one at https://thepursuitofweirdness.blogspot.in/2016/08/codata-rda-school-of-research-data.html

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I recently attended the ‘CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science’ at International Centre for Theoretical Physics,Trieste, Italy. With participants from almost 16 developing countries from varied academic backgrounds, we had an amazing workshop with all hands-on training with specific tools and softwares.

Middle East and South-east Asia
Opinions from Africa
Ideas about Open Science from East and Australia
Reasons not to share data and counter-arguments

The idea of Open Science and it’s principles was the key focus of our workshop. We discussed a lot of myths and stereotypes surrounding our individual ideas of Open Science and how different factors influence different regions for open sharing.

While accessibility to Internet connection  is a major issue in Cuba, unwillingness to share one’s work before publishing it is mostly common among all regions.

With hands-on practice, we learned about topics ranging from basics like Unix, R, SQL and Git to advance like Neural Networks, High Performance Computing, Distributed Environment and Visualization.

A peak into one of the visualization ideas
Participants experimenting with visual ideas through pen and paper
 We got lucky enough to grab the recent journal of ‘Open Data in a Big world’, too.

 Apart from technical expertise, I met so many people and learned about new culture and places due to the global immersion. It was a lot of learning.The fact that how ‘where we are born’ can influence our lives so much, amazed me. How subtly we get entitled to so many things and we don’t appreciate them enough!

A Saudi Arabian friend told me that there are still walls within the university classrooms to segregate boys and girls.While a Cuban guy shared that there is no internet there, for general people. Just because he’s a professor, he can access the web at 36Kbps. I can’t even imagine, both the situations!

Somehow, they depict how important and hard , open access and sharing of research is, for some communities. And it’s a bigger and much needed goal!

My favorite success story from the workshop is about my roommate from India. With no technical background at all and complaints of how her programmer colleagues from office used to trick her by telling how complex work they are doing, she gained a huge confidence after the workshop and learned a lot of ‘know-hows’ about Data Science.

In and all, it was an amazing experience with lot of learning. I learned about international standards of Open access and data sharing. I got a huge community to keep the spirit of ‘Open Science’ high and spread across our own local communities.

Thank you all organizers, directors and sponsors for making it possible.

Data Science Journal Special Collection for SciDataCon 2016

Data Science Journal is pleased to announce that it will be publishing the high profile special collection of papers from SciDataCon 2016.

Authors with papers accepted for presentation at SciDataCon are also invited to submit their full papers to the Data Science Journal.  Submissions should be made at http://datascience.codata.org/

Please note the following:

  • The deadline for submissions to be part of the SciDataCon 2016 special collection is 30 September.
  • Even though abstracts were peer-reviewed and accepted as part of the conference process, the full paper will be peer-reviewed to ensure quality.
  • Given the number of papers expected we are unable to waive the Article Processing Charge (APC) for all papers, however the Data Science Journal is very competitive and has a progressive waiver policy for those unable to pay the APC: http://datascience.codata.org/about/submissions/ Please contact the Editor-in-Chief before submitting your article if you would like to request a waiver. Editorial decisions are made independently from the ability to pay the APC.

SciDataCon 2016

http://www.scidatacon.org/2016/ and http://www.scidatacon.org/site/themes-scope/:

Advancing the Frontiers of Data in Research

SciDataCon 2016 seeks to advance the frontiers of data in all areas of research. This means addressing a range of fundamental and urgent issues around the ‘Data Revolution’ and the recent data-driven transformation of research and the responses to these issues in the conduct of research.

SciDataCon 2016 is motivated by the conviction that the most significant contemporary research challenges—and in particular those reaching across traditional disciplines—cannot be properly addressed without paying attention to issues relating to data.  These issues include policy frameworks, data quality and interoperability, long-term stewardship of data, and the research skills, technologies, and infrastructures required by increasingly data-intensive research.  They also include frontier challenges for data science: for example, fundamental research questions relating to data integration, analysis of complex systems and models, epistemology and ethics in relation to Big Data, and so on.

The transformative effect of the data revolution needs to be examined from the perspective of all fields of research and its relationship to broader societal developments and to data-driven innovation scrutinised.  Taken together these issues form a multi-faceted challenge which cannot be tackled without expertise drawn from many disciplines and diverse roles in the research enterprise.  Furthermore, the transformations around data in research are essentially international and the response must be genuinely global.  SciDataCon is the international conference for research into these issues.

SciDataCon2016 will take place on 11-13 September 2016 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, Denver, Colorado, USA.  It is part of International Data Week, 11-16 September 2016, convened by CODATA, the ICSU World Data System and the Research Data Alliance.