CIRSS

CIRSS Researchers at ASIS&T 2009

Liesl O'Kane — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:00:00 CST

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.

Melissa Cragin to present at the biennial Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference

Liesl O'Kane — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:00:00 CST

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.

CIRSS Funded for Data Curation Research and Education as Part of $20 Million NSF Award

Carole L. Palmer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:00:00 CDT

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 Presenting at Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse: October 25 - 29

Kevin Trainor — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:00:00 CDT

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.

Metadata for a Web 2.0 software marketplace (e.g., Bamboo) @ e-Research Roundtable -October 28

Liesl O'Kane — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:00:00 CDT

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

Open Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)@ Metadata roundtable 10/21/09

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:00:00 CDT

Metadata roundtable group is meeting tomorrow, October 21st, from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, in Rm. 341 at GSLIS, to discuss the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) standard and its applications. Tim Cole, Jerry McDonough, and Richard Urban will lead our discussion. The list of background readings is posted to the Metadata roundtable webpage.
Please share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in the topic. Everyone is welcome to attend and participate in discussion.

Richard Urban to present at COSLA, October 26-28

Liesl O'Kane — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:00:00 CDT

Richard J. Urban will present at the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies annual meeting, Monday, October 26 through Wednesday, October 28, 2009 in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Richard is a doctoral student at GSLIS and a Graduate Research Assistant for the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project. COSLA is an independent organization of the chief officers of state and territorial agencies designated as the state library administrative agency and responsible for statewide library development. Richard will present on state libraries' involvement with the IMLS DCC project at the Networking Committee and General Meetings.

NIF Resource Registry and Ontology @ e-Research Roundtable - October 7th

Kevin Trainor — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:00:00 CDT

Please join us on October 7th from 12:30-2:00 in 242 LIS for the next e-Research Roundtable (ERRT). Anita Bandrowski (NIF, UCSD) will be leading an informal discussion on the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) Resource Registry and Ontology.

A description of this session and a list of suggested background readings can be found at the ERRT Web page.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Bertram Ludaescher Lecture - September 21 at 11:00 AM

Kevin Trainor — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:00:00 CDT

Title: Modeling and Design of Scientific Workflows with Data Assembly Lines, Provenance, and Semantic Types

Date: Monday, September 21st

Time: 11:00 AM

Location: LIS 126

Abstract: Despite an increasing interest in scientific workflow technologies in recent years, workflow design remains a challenging, slow, and often error-prone process, thus limiting the speed of further adoption of scientific workflows. Based on practical experience with data-driven workflows, we identify and illustrate a number of recurring scientific workflow design challenges, i.e., parameter-rich functions; data assembly, disassembly, and cohesion; conditional execution; iteration; and, more generally, workflow evolution. In the second part of the talk, we discuss related workflow research issues, i.e., the importance of provenance and data lineage in scientific workflows and the use of logic-based semantic types in workflow design.

See http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/BertramLecture.html for an extended abstract.

Bertram Ludaescher is professor at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center, both at the University of California, Davis. His research focus includes modeling, design, and optimization of scientific workflows and databases, data and workflow provenance, and knowledge representation and reasoning for scientific workflows and scientific data integration. He is currently involved in several collaborative scientific data and workflow management projects, including the DOE Scientific Data Management (SciDAC/SDM) Center project and NSF projects to develop scientific workflow technology (Kepler-CORE), e.g., for bioinformatics and environmental observatory applications (REAP, COMET). Prof. Ludaescher received his M.S. (Dipl.-Inform.) in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe in 1992 and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany in 1998. Until 2004 he was a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.

Flickr metadata discussion @ Metadata Roundtable September 23

oksana zavalina — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:15:00 CDT

This Wednesday, September 23rd, from 12:30 to 2:00 pm, we will be meeting in room LIS341 (ISRL Fishbowl) for Round 2 of our discussion on Flickr metadata started in July. Suggested background readings include:

1. Library of Congress Flickr pilot project summary report: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final_summary.pdf. More information about the LOC Flickr project can be found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html

2. Smithsonian Flickr project report: http://www.springerlink.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu/content/736076w718161118/fulltext.pdf

3. IMLS DCC Flickr feasibility study proposal to IMLS (excerpt): https://netfiles.uiuc.edu:443/zavalina/Proposal%20for%20IMLS%20DCC%20Flickr%20Feasibility%20Study.doc

Everyone interested is invited to attend and participate in discussion.