CIRSS

CIRSS researchers will be participating in the upcoming American Society for Information Science and Technology conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 6-11, 2009.

Panels:

DataNet partners: Sharing science, linking domains, curating data. Co-panelists: Robert Sandusky, Suzie Allard, Melissa Cragin, Patricia Cruse, Allen Renear, and Carol Tenopir.

Bridging Between Scientific Disciplines: Educational Strategies to Meet the Challenge of Manageing Information Across the Sciences (SIGs STI, ED). Co-panelists: Catherine Blake, John D'lgnazio, and Diane Sonnenwald.

Asking difficult questions about institutional repositories: Factors for success and new directions for development and research. Co-panelists: June Abbas, Catherine Mitchell, and Soo Young.

Strategic reading in science. Beyond (simple) reading: strategies, discoveries, and collaborations, panel. First author: Allen H. Renear; organized by Vetle Torvik; co-panelists, Neil Smalheiser & Cathy Marshall.

On November 4th, Melissa Cragin will present on the Data Conservancy at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference, as part of the two-day informatics meeting organized by the Salmon Data Access Working Group.

The Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive approximately $2.9 million dollars as a partner on the Data Conservancy project, a $20 million initiative led by the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries. The five-year award, one of the first two in the NSF's DataNet program, will build
infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital research data. The principal investigator is Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center, and associate dean of university libraries, at Johns Hopkins. The sub-award to the University of Illinois is led by co-principal investigator, Carole L. Palmer, director of CIRSS and professor at GSLIS. Other CIRSS researchers include Melissa Cragin, Allen Renear, John MacMullen, and David Dubin from GSLIS, and Michael Welge from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The project will begin with data from astronomy, the life sciences, earth sciences, and social sciences, developing a framework to more fully understand data practices currently in use, and arrive at a model for curation that allows ease of access both within and across disciplines. "Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and data-intensive," said Choudhury, "which means that new management structures and technologies will be critical to accommodate the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and streams. The potential for the sharing and application of data across disciplines is incredible. But it's not enough to simply discover data; you need to be able to access it and be assured it will remain available."

The Illinois team will contribute to multiple aspects of the project, conducting studies of scientists' data practices and needs, and analyzing how best to represent complex units of data in the repository. "We will be conducting a systematic analysis of the data curation requirements across the disciplines served by the Data Conservancy," said Palmer. "Our primary interest is in the 'long tail of small science,' and how to support collecting and sharing of the highly variable types of data produced by individual scientists and small research groups. Our results will determine data curation and preservation requirements but also policies to guide how the Data Conservancy and other large, cross-disciplinary data repositories are developed and used." The research led by Renear will develop formal terminology and identity conditions for fundamental data concepts. "Many of the key cross-cutting concepts of scientific data organization remain poorly defined," said Renear. "Our work will provide the foundation for standardizing how Data Conservancy datasets are identified, described, related, and organized."

The CIRSS research activities and other Data Conservancy efforts will feed directly into two professional training programs at GSLIS, the Data Curation specialization in the master's of library and information science and the Biological Information Specialists master's in the campus-wide bioinformatics program. The award will also support professional development in data curation principles, processes, and technologies.

Allen Renear, GSLIS Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research, will be presenting Strategic reading and scientific discourse at the Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse. 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), October 25-29, Washington, DC.

Please join us on October 28th from 12:30-2:00 in 341 LIS for the next e-Research Roundtable (ERRT). John Unsworth (GSLIS) and Loretta Auvil (NCSA) will be leading the informal discussion on the Metadata for Web 2.0 software marketplace. The Mellon Foundation is interested in supporting the sharing of web services and academic software widgets, and they would like SEASR (the NCSA software environment for advancement of scholarly research) to be able to keep track of whose web services, software widgets, etc. are being used, by whom, in order that some system of professional credit and/or a system of exchange of value could be developed across the universities whose faculty and staff contribute to the system.  This has a near-term practical possibility of implementation, as part of Project Bamboo (http://projectbamboo.org/). 

The recommended reading is the current draft of the Bamboo Implementation proposal, particularly section 4, "Areas of Work": available at https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/display/BPUB/BIP+Discussion+Draft+v0.6