Data Without Meaning: Establishing the Significant Properties of Digital Research

Knight, Gareth; Pennock, Maureen

doi:10.2218/ijdc.v4i1.86

Cited by 22 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Such measures can only be implemented by researchers themselves who know their data, the dependencies among themand the needed tools, and understand the relationships between data, models, and theories intimately, see e.g., [13,18,37,42].…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At best some less direct influence can be gained by curators via policies, guidelines, and training. Issues regularly encountered concern missing meta data and context documentation, missing information on file formats (properties, dependencies, related software), lost or corrupted data files, and missing or unclear information on legal aspects (rights to access and use of data, as well as third party rights), e.g., [13,26]. As there is often a time lag of several years (or even decades) between the onset of data production or collection and the decision to publish and preserve data, there is a risk that these issues do not receive the necessary attention at the time the information gaps could still be closed easily.…”

Section: Handling Of Research Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice

Sesartić

Fischlin

Töwe

2016

IJGI

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Abstract:Research as a digital enterprise has created new, often poorly addressed challenges for the management and curation of research to ensure continuity, transparency, and accountability. There is a common misunderstanding that curation can be considered at a later point in the research cycle or delegated or that it is too burdensome or too expensive due to a lack of efficient tools. This creates a curation gap between research practice and curation needs. We argue that this gap can be narrowed if curators provide attractive support that befits research needs and if researchers consistently manage their work according to generic concepts consistently from the beginning. A rather uniquely long-term case study demonstrates how such concepts have helped to pragmatically implement a research practice intentionally using only minimalist tools for sustained, self-contained archiving since 1989. The paper sketches the concepts underlying three core research activities. (i) handling of research data, (ii) reference management as part of scholarly publishing, and (iii) advancing theories through modelling and simulation. These concepts represent a universally transferable best research practice, while technical details are obviously prone to continuous change. We hope it stimulates researchers to manage research similarly and that curators gain a better understanding of the curation challenges research practice actually faces.

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Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Handling Of Research Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice

Sesartić

Fischlin

Töwe

2016

IJGI

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“…Key to this approach is the very Socratic notion of 'significant properties' that was developed in the CEDARS project and has recently received useful coverage within the InSPECT project (Knight and Pennock 2009) and from the British Library (Dappert and Farquhar 2009). Significant properties are held to refer to the very essence of a digital object; its intellectual content.…”

Section: "Finally Migration Does Not Scale Well Because It Is Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Changing Face of the History of Computing: The Role of Emulation in Protecting Our Digital Heritage

Anderson

Delve

Powell

2012

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Abstract. It is becoming increasingly common for some source material to arrive on our desks after having been transferred to digital format, but little of the material on which we work was actually born digital. Anyone whose work is being done today is likely to leave behind very little that is not digital. Being digital changes everything. This article discusses the issues involved in the protection of digital objects.

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“…An extensive body of research on sustainable digital preservation of properties exists under the name of significant properties [16].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital weight watching: reconstruction of scanned documents

Marx

Gielissen

2010

IJDAR

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A web portal providing access to over 250.000 scanned and OCRed cultural heritage documents is analyzed. The collection consists of the complete Dutch Hansard from 1917 to 1995. Each document consists of facsimile images of the original pages plus hidden OCRed text. The inclusion of images yields large file sizes of which less than 2% is the actual text. The search user interface of the portal provides poor ranking and not very informative document summaries (snippets). Thus, users are instrumental in weeding out non-relevant results. For that, they must assess the complete documents. This is a time-consuming and frustrating process because of long download and processing times of the large files. Instead of using the scanned images for relevance assessment, we propose to use a reconstruction of the original document from a purely semantic representation. Evaluation on the Dutch dataset shows that these reconstructions become two orders of magnitude smaller and still resemble the original to a high degree. In addition, they are easier to speed-read and evaluate for relevance, due to added hyperlinks and a presentation optimized for reading from a terminal. We describe the reconstruction process and evaluate the costs, the benefits, and the quality.

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Data Without Meaning: Establishing the Significant Properties of Digital Research

Cited by 22 publications

References 3 publications

Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice

Towards Narrowing the Curation Gap—Theoretical Considerations and Lessons Learned from Decades of Practice

The Changing Face of the History of Computing: The Role of Emulation in Protecting Our Digital Heritage

Digital weight watching: reconstruction of scanned documents

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