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.

In the statement below, in support of his candidacy as CODATA President, Takashi Gojobori, presents his vision of CODATA initiatives for data-centric sciences and technologies for ‘Big Data’ and ‘Small Data’ which he describes as ‘beyond 50 years of CODATA’.  It is also available as a pdf.

Vision for CODATA

Following its mission, CODATA works to improve the quality, reliability, management and accessibility of data of importance to all fields of science and technology, I would like to work, together with the elected EC members, to ensure that CODATA takes a strong initiative of dealing with Data-centric Sciences and Technology for the so-called “Big Data” and “Small Data.” Taking into account the fact that CODATA will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2016, I would like to try to make CODATA more visible in global scale, in both developed and developing countries.

Challenging issues for CODATA

The most important challenge for CODATA in a practical sense is to carry out the CODATA Strategic Plan 2013-12018, as scheduled. Of course, I think that we may need some flexibility, depending upon any changes as time goes. However, this strategic plan was established through tremendous discussion and unified consensus among the CODATA members, so I would like to place greatest emphasis on carrying out this Plan.

Taking into account the CODATA Strategic Plan 2013-2018, I think that the following issues can be addressed in CODATA, under the common recognition that data is playing a central role in science and technologies. In particular, in order for us to take actual actions, I would like to try to lead to the situation that most issues listed here can be recognized as the common understandings among the CODATA members.

Importance and significance of Data-centric Sciences and Technologies

I believe that CODATA can take more active stance in promoting Data-centric Sciences and Technologies, recognizing its importance and significance.

Computing resource and networking for Data-centric Sciences and Technologies

There is no doubt that we should encourage all stakeholders to assure effective use of computing resource and networking for Data-centric Sciences. and Technologies.

Data explosion and care of “Small Data”

Although we know that the time of the data explosion called “Big Data” has come, we have also to ensure more careful care to “Small Data”, because they are also precious and indispensable in most cases.

Disaster and Data Management

We recognize that disaster issues demonstrate direct connections between society and data. Data management for disasters should continue in CODATA activities.

Environments and Data Management

In developing the economic activities, environmental factors have already become a central matter of debate between the developing countries and developed countries. But, debates should be conducted using scientifically justifiable data.

Data Standardization

It is obvious that data standardization is essential for ensuring global activities of science and technologies. Thus, CODATA should continue its global contributions to Data Standardization.

Data Visualization

It is getting more important to have Data Visualization to ensure further developments of Data-centric Science and Technologies and also to promote the reach-out activities to the Society.

Data citation and commercial publications

In collaboration with publishes, we need more detailed discussions on Data citation and commercial publications.

Data Consumption and Necessity of Archives

Some data are used just like consumption, whereas the other data should be kept as archives. We need clearer concepts and definition of those features of data. We have to discuss the issues on Data Consumption and Necessity of Archives.

Data literacy and Education of Data-centric Sciences

CODATA promote its activities particularly in the developing countries on Data literacy and Education of Data-centric Sciences and Technologies.

CODATA for Developing countries

CODATA contributes to developing countries by promoting educational activities. Moreover, economic development can be achieved through the formation of a data-oriented society, in which CODATA can be helpful in every aspect of the related domains.

CODATA and WDS

One of the most important tasks in the coming years is the close collaboration with WDS. The liaison between CODATA and WDS can be established to the stage of firm ground.

Data Journal of CODATA

The present Data Journal of CODATA can be transformed into a more active and practical form, taking into account the development of open access journals including well-known commercial publishers.

Discussion on CODATA Academy of Data Science

We should continue the discussion on the CODATA Academy of Data Science.

CODATA as Practicing Organization

CODATA can play a role in policy-making and its promotion of implement through various organizations and opportunities.

What I would like to try to achieve in the coming 4 years.

• I would like to increase global visibility of CODATA by taking initiative of Data-centric Sciences and Technologies for the so-called “Big Data” and “Small Data”
• I would lie to carry out the CODATA Strategic Plan 2013-12018, as scheduled.
• I would like to deepen the intimate collaboration between CODATA and WDS.
• I would like to conduct a 50 anniversary symposium for reinforcing the vision of the CODATA.
• I would like to promote activities the Task Groups and Working Groups of CODATA.

In short, I strongly value the reason for CODATA’s existence is to help foster and advance science and technology through developing and sharing knowledge about data and the activities that work with data.

That is all.

I have accepted the proposal of CODATA TG PASTD to be nominated as a member of CODATA Executive Committee with respect and gratitude. I consider this as an opportunity to be more fully involved in the initiatives of CODATA, which are aimed at resolving global threats.

Let me briefly introduce myself. I am a specialist in the sphere of Computer Science and have been the head of the World Data Center for Geoinformatics and Sustainable Development (WDC-Ukraine) for 7 years. I also have MSc in Public Administration.

My active participation in the activities of CODATA started in 2008 when I jointed the Executive Board of the Ukrainian National Committee for CODATA and as the Deputy Сhair of the local organizing committee jointed the activities of the organization – 21st International CODATA Conference, which took place in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since 2010 I have been participating in the activities of CODATA TG PASTD (especially in data long term preservation and open access in Ukraine, open access to data for Sustainable Development).

I am also responsible for a set of questions on organization and coordination activities within interdisciplinary research initiated by Ukrainian National Committee for CODATA and WDC-Ukraine, related to the necessity of system compliance and analysis of various-natured data. There are some projects that I would like to point out. These projects are aimed at study, quantitative evaluation and the analysis of sustainable development processes of countries and Ukrainian regions in the context of quality and safety of human life.

My primary scientific and professional work is connected with developing approaches and methods for integration of data and applications, for designing and developing problem-oriented distributed systems and databases.

If elected to the Executive Committee, I will direct my efforts to developing and promoting methods and approaches to create open and permanently available information resource of scientific data related to sustainable development.

This is the fourteenth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. David Patterson is a new candidate seeking election to the CODATA Executive Committee.  He is nominated by the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS).

IUBS is delighted to have the opportunity to seek representation of the International Union of Biological Sciences on the CODATA Executive Committee. The new IUBS agenda is to promote ‘Unified Biology’, and we expect that biodiversity informatics will play a key role in achieving this goal. The development of infrastructure requires stable long-term funding, and community wide participation to provide the community as a whole with free, open, and relevant services. A close association with the CODATA through David Patterson’s participation in the Executive Committee will allow IUBS to call upon the expertise within CODATA to help guide the emergence of a unifying infrastructure for digital information, to strengthen the interactions within the bio cluster of ICSU, and help promote the biodiversity sciences within CODATA.

Taxonomy is the traditional discipline within biology that catalogues our understanding of the diversity of life, and forms the framework around which we organize much of our thinking about different types of organisms. One of David’s aims is to embed taxonomic logic and content in an open and free infrastructure that will be able to index distributed content about species in heterogeneous data environments and to organize that information as a first step to its analysis. He led the implementation team for the Encyclopedia of Life, a large scale project that successfully demonstrated how taxonomic expertise can be called upon to create an organizational framework for digital information on all forms of life.

He has been a member of the International Committee on Bionomenclature, is currently a member of the executive of IUBS, and a commissioner for the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature. His academic career includes institutions in England, Australia and the US, and he has been involved in research projects relating to taxonomy, evolution, ecology and informatics in those countries and as part of the European funding. He was tightly associated with the drafting and release of the Bouchout Declaration (bouchoutdeclaration.org) which provides an opportunity for individuals and institutions in the biodiversity sciences to declare their support for open and free access to biodiversity information. He is currently active in the Research Data Alliance, and the development of the Biodiversity Data Interest Group.

David Patterson’s full CV is available here.