The analytic potential of scientific data: Understanding re-use value

Abstract

While problems related to the curation and preservation of scientific data are receiving considerable attention from the information science and digital repository communities, relatively little progress has been made on approaches for evaluating the value of data to inform investment in acquisition, curation, and preservation. Adapting Hjørland's concept of the "epistemological potential" of documents, we assert that analytic potential, or the value of data for analysis beyond its original use, should guide development of data collections for repositories aimed at supporting research. Three key aspects of the analytic potential of data are identified and discussed: preservation readiness, potential user communities, and fit for purpose. Based on evidence from research from the Data Conservancy initiative, we demonstrate how the analytic potential of data can be determined and applied to build large-scale data collections suited for grand challenge science.

Data sharing for the advancement of science: Overcoming barriers for citizen scientists

“…Data collected for individual or voluntary purposes may or may not be suitable for reuse and sharing for scientific purposes (Palmer, Weber, & Cragin, ). One of the issues for the potential reuse of citizen science data is whether appropriate metadata are available.…”

Data Citation as a Bibliometric Oxymoron

“…The few studies on data reuse indicate that scientifically important uses of data may not be mentioned or cited in publications (Palmer, Weber, & Cragin, 2011;Wallis et al, 2013;Wynholds et al, 2012). The reasons for lack of citation are many.…”

“…Proprietary control of these graphs will hide those chains of evidence from other programs, users, and bibliometricians. To the extent that these metadata schema are adopted, and especially to the extent that graphs are open, they should aid in discovery of research data (DataCite, 2014;"Object Reuse and Exchange," 2014;Schema.org, 2012;World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2013). However, individual researchers tend to invest very little effort in providing metadata or other curatorial description to their data to make them usable for others.…”

Scientific Knowledge Mobilization: Co-evolution of Data Products and Designated Communities

“…It was recognized that the data would also be of interest to a wide variety of audiences, including the climate community and potentially the public given its implications for sea level rise. Drawing on experience with sea ice data, an assessment of the analytic potential (Palmer et al, 2011) of the data was incorporated in the data accession process. A variety of additional data products were generated, including gridded daily melt status files, gridded annual files where each pixel contained a count of the number of days of melt that year, and a climatology of the entire time series from which anomaly maps could be generated.…”