Building a Disciplinary, World-Wide Data Infrastructure

Abstract

Sharing scientific data with the objective of making it discoverable, accessible, reusable, and interoperable requires work and presents challenges being faced at the disciplinary level to define in particular how the data should be formatted and described. This paper represents the Proceedings of a session held at SciDataCon 2016 (Denver, 12-13 September 2016). It explores the way a range of disciplines, namely materials science, crystallography, astronomy, earth sciences, humanities and linguistics, get organized at the international level to address those challenges. The disciplinary culture with respect to data sharing, science drivers, organization, lessons learnt and the elements of the data infrastructure which are or could be shared with others are briefly described. Commonalities and differences are assessed. Common key elements for success are identified: data sharing should be science driven; defining the disciplinary part of the interdisciplinary standards is mandatory but challenging; sharing of applications should accompany data sharing. Incentives such as journal and funding agency requirements are also similar. For all, social aspects are more challenging than technological ones. Governance is more diverse, often specific to the discipline organization. Being problem-driven is also a key factor of success for building bridges to enable interdisciplinary research. Several international data organizations such as CODATA, RDA and WDS can facilitate the establishment of disciplinary interoperability frameworks. As a spin-off of the session, a RDA Disciplinary Interoperability Interest Group is proposed to bring together representatives across disciplines to better organize and drive the discussion for prioritizing, harmonizing and efficiently articulating disciplinary needs.

Open-access policy and data-sharing practice in UK academia

“…Funding agencies and academic institutions should also fund and maintain infrastructure for data sharing, including providing training and support for research-ers who intend to share data [8]. This is especially important for those disciplinary areas without cross-domain infra-structure or common practice [23].…”

“…However, a study found that a key challenge for Humanities scholars is their lack of ability with tools and methods to link data housed in different archives [7]. A recent study also identified infrastructure issues as one of the main barriers for researchers in Humanities to share data because there is no single common practice across Humanities, thus calling for the development of cross-domain infrastructure components to allow data sharing among Humanities [23]. Ethical issues involve human subjects may affect academics’ willingness and ability to share research data.…”

Crystallography and Databases

“…Yet each provides a valuable service to science, and is highly regarded within the research community. This diverse and thriving ecosystem of databases, underpinned by data exchange standards and the desire to ensure the highest achievable quality, is key to the strength of crystallography's world-wide data infrastructure (Genova et al 2017).…”

Data as a research infrastructure CDS, the Virtual Observatory, astronomy, and beyond

“…The way different disciplines organise themselves to tackle the development of their disciplinary interoperability framework was discussed during a session [24] of the SciDataCon 2016 Conference 12 , which was held in Denver (USA) on 2016, September 11 th − 13 th . The panel included representatives from humanities, linguistics, astronomy, earth sciences, material sciences and crystallography.…”

“…As explained in [24], international organizations such as GEO, CODATA and the RDA can be used to help disciplines which are not strongly organised at the international level to discuss their data framework. International discussion forums can be established as CODATA Task Groups and/or RDA Interest and Working Groups (Section 5).…”