ISI CODATA International Training Workshop on Big Data, Bangalore, India, 9-20 March 2015
In Bangalore, India on 9-20 March 2015, CODATA and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI)- along with other partners – convened an International Training Workshop on Big Data at the Indian Statistical Institute. This continued the emerging series of International Training Workshops which CODATA is seeking to establish with a variety of partners. In this purpose, previous training workshops have been held in Beijing, China and in Nairobi, Kenya.
Objectives
The intensive, two week residential course had as its goal to train early and mid-career data professionals in using latest technology and techniques in Big Data management and its exploitation. 
Methodology
The workshop had a carefully designed curriculum to cover broad introductory topics to data, data handling issues, standards and interoperability – it considered generic data issues and specific challenges associated with Big Data. In an integrated way, the workshop combined theoretical topics with practical activities including demonstrations and illustrations, short exercises involving the participants and project work.
Workshop Syllabus
- 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
Convenors
A.R.D. Prasad
Head,Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC)
Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore
head (at) drtc.isibang.ac.in
Dr Simon Hodson
CODATA Executiv Director
execdir (at) codata.org
Devika P. Madalli
Associate Professor, Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC)
Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore
devika (at) drtc.isibang.ac.in
Partners
Research Data Alliance (RDA)
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data.
The RDA vision is researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.
Mozilla Science Lab
Mozilla Science Lab is a community of researchers, developers, and librarians making 
research open and accessible. We’re empowering open science leaders through fellowships, mentorship, and project-based learning.
Software and Data Carpentry
with generous support from Mozilla Science lab, instructors from Software and Data Carpentry provided three days of training activities in R, MySQL and GitHub.
International Union of Biological Sciences
‘Promoting biological sciences for a better life’ 
The International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) is a non-governmental, non-profit organisation, established in 1919. Its objectives are:
- to promote the study of biological sciences
- to initiate, facilitate and coordinate research and other scientific activities necessitating international, interdisciplinary cooperation
- to ensure the discussion and dissemination of the results of cooperative research, particularly in connection with IUBS scientific programmes
- to support the organisation of international conferences and assist in the publication of their reports.
Online, open-access journal that includes, as part of its publishing activities, the database GigaDB (http://www.gigadb.org). 
GigaScience is co-published in collaboration between BGI and BioMed Central, to meet the needs of a new generation of biological and biomedical research as it enters the era of “big-data.” The journal’s scope covers studies from the entire spectrum of the life sciences that produce and use large-scale data as the center of their work. Data from these articles are hosted in GigaDB, from where they can be cited to provide a direct link between the study and the data supporting it, as well as access to relevant tools for reproducing or reusing these data.
Read more
ISI-CODATA Big Data Workshop as Word Clouds (post by Shiva Khanal)