Schloss Dagstuhl Event 19413
A week-long workshop was held on the subject of standards in cross-domain data use for science, health, and social science at Schloss Dagstuhl – the Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany, 6-11 October 2019. The meeting was sponsored by CODATA, the data-focused arm of the International Science Council (ISC), and the DDI Alliance, an international member-driven consortium which provides technical standards for research data in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences. CODATA is currently working towards a launch of a decadal programme on cross-disciplinary data as part of the ISC’s Science Action Plan. The DDI Alliance is now developing an information model for integrating data across domain boundaries. The workshop was subsidized by Schloss Dagstuhl – the Leibniz Center for Informatics.
Workshop series
This workshop was the second addressing this important topic, the earlier one also taking place at Dagstuhl in October 2018. Both focused on specific real-world use cases: the first was an exploration of specific issues encountered in the use of data across domain boundaries; the second aimed at producing practical guidance for addressing them.
Among other outcomes, the first workshop contributed to the work on the next-generation DDI model, making it a more suitable tool for dealing with cross-domain data integration independent of the social sciences. Other standards and models were also examined (e.g. spatio-temporal aspects of DCAT). This focus on practical guidance for cross-domain data use is expected to continue into the ISC’s decadal programme.
Workshop participants included representatives of use cases and technology and standards experts across several different domains, including the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, geophysical and environmental science, health research, disaster risk reduction, urban planning and policy, and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Standards concerned with statistical and research data and metadata were an important consideration (e.g., DDI, SDMX) and specialized application schemas (e.g. OBO vocabularies from the life sciences, ISO 19115 from geospatial data community). Technical experts ranged from those involved in developing standards to systems implementers. Almost half of the participants overlapped with the first workshop.