Timisoara/Scribe/Robert Ulrich - re3data.org - making research data repositories discoverable

• Facilitator: Robert Urlich
• Scribe: Benedikt Kämpgen

Summary

• Publishing Open research data has similar but aggravated problems than publishing general Open Data.
• Diversity of data, requirements, use cases.
• No technicians
• Not to mention archiving requirements

• Tools for publishing research data are available
  • Data repositories (re3data.org, more than 1,000 ones)
  • Semantic MediaWiki
  • Linked Data

• However, the fundamental problem we see in the way many researchers do their research
  • Downloading data
  • Transforming it into formats of commercial tools
  • Funded for their publications and not for datasets.
• Better would be a webby-way
  • To have research pipelines that are fully reproducible.
  • Access and produce Open Research Data over the web.
  • Possible best practices:
    • Research data should not be forgotten as part of PSI and serve a stress test of the results of Share-PSI.
    • Researchers should be trained in data science techniques.

Scribe Notes

• Research data is very specific to the fields.

Everyone presenting himself/herself:

• Robert Ulrich
• http://www.re3data.org/
• Here for gathering feedback about a best practice in publishing research data
• Camelia
  • What exactly is published?
• Robert
  • No research papers.
  • Research data repositories are indexed.

• Andrew McKenzie
  • Research and teaching
  • Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Open Academy
  • Data Journalism
  • Social sciences

• Camelia Margea
• More recently confronted with the opening phenomenon during activities for the Faculty’s journal:
  • http://www.tjeb.ro
  • West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration - Business Information Systems Department
  • Opening up research

• Adina Barbulescu
  • West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration - Economics department

• Benedikt
  • KIT in Karlsruhe
  • Two ways to publish data
    • Semantic MediaWiki
    • Linked Data (RDF)

• Andras
  • Hungary
  • Research institute of informatics
  • Social science repository
  • Publishing a bilingual economics journal.
  • REPEC (indexing mechanism for articles, intelligent journal: text, data, algorithms)
  • RDF browser and editor (lodmilla)

Social science data archive:
http://openarchive.tk.mta.hu/117/

Sharing Linked data visualization:
http://lodmilla.sztaki.hu/lodmilla/?id=hhaeuotogto2k565i7644folcg

• Benedikt: How much manual effort to connect articles with datasets
  • Andras: Too much for most researchers.

• Benedikt: I guess problem is that annotation is only done after the research is finished.
• Wondering whether there are approaches for publishing your data during the research.
• Robert: 1) problem because of privacy and data security. 2) researchers do not want to make available raw data.

• Andrew: Also, even after the paper has been published, they would not do it.
• It is also a funding topic. If people are funded to publish their data, they are more willing to do it.

• Andras: Benefit: Have dataset as an own publication.

• Andrew
  • A lot that drives Open Data is outside of the public market.
  • People needs rewards, but money may not be enough, but publishing.
  • Raw data usually are not project deliverables (as final published papers are) – this could be another reason why researchers are not motivated to publish data, even the research is founded (thus, financially rewarded) – Robert and Camelia agreed
  • Andrew also said that researchers can be motivated (or informed about that aspect) by citations to their work, that could be actually doubled when referencing paper+data

• Robert
  • Scientists are coming and asking how to publish data.
  • Researchers are focusing on their research they only want a short "how-to publish research data".

• Benedikt: How to compare data portal?
  • Robert: icon system
  • Ranked by the icon
  • Currently indexed around 1,000 data repositories.
  • Some would also demand money for their service.

• Adina
  • Are repositories categorised?
  • Robert: Categorisation is difficult if it goes into details.

• Robert
  • We use classification of DFG in Germany.
  • Adopt the fields every two year.

• Andrew: Do you scrape the data, or how do you organise?
  • We collect research data repositories manually.
  • We have experts evaluating such repositories.
  • Currently manual.
  • Goal would be to crawl the metadata about the repository.

• Andras:
  • Why not link to DBpedia?

• Andrew
  • Would it not be possible to broadcast instead of approaching single repositories.

• Robert:
  • Librarians would concentrate on the accuracy of the data.
  • Technicians (with a Web background) more concentrate on completeness and minimised manual effort.

• Benedikt:
  • What are the disadvantages of simply providing your research data as a CSV or RDF on the institutes website.
  • Robert:
    • The problem is long term preservation.
    • There are discussions about what data to forget
  • Andras:
    • I.e. data cemetery
    • Also magnetic tape?
    • Robert: Still problematic because there may not be software to read the data.

• Andras:
  • What are your plans?
  • Archive may not be large.

• Andrew
  • I think you should separately view the archiving problem from the problem of making research data available during a project.
  • The problem is the funding of the publishers.

• Andrew
  • Are there tools?
  • We had problems with dcat
  • Are there tools to automatically create RDF.

• Andras
  • Problem that researchers use commercial software.
  • Not sufficient interoperability of tools
  • Requires switches of how to do data-driven research

• Camelia
  • Probably also a teaching issue.
    • Robert: old habits hard to change (remarked over time how difficult users switch from Google drive to Wiki – actually, almost no switch, no matter how friendly the editor/GUI is)
    • Camelia
      • Presenting open source alternatives to each software could be a solution for preparing future researchers to see and use in other ways their data (a broader perspective).