Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Open data and the academy: an evaluation of CKAN for research data management

This paper offers a full and critical evaluation of the open source CKAN software (http://ckan.org) for use as a Research Data Management (RDM) tool within a university environment. It presents a case study of CKAN's implementation and use at the University of Lincoln, UK, and highlights its strengths and current weaknesses as an institutional Research Data Management tool. The author draws on his prior experience of implementing a mixed media Digital Asset Management system (DAM), Institutional Repository (IR) and institutional Web Content Management System (CMS), to offer an outline proposal for how CKAN can be used effectively for data analysis, storage and publishing in academia. This will be of interest to researchers, data librarians, and developers, who are responsible for the implementation of institutional RDM infrastructure. This paper is presented as part of the dissemination activities of the Jisc-funded Orbital project (http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk

Research Libraries and Research Data Management within the Humanities and Social Sciences

Research Data Management (RDM) is a process that is designed to deliver high quality datasets, which comply with scholarly, legal and ethical requirements. There are two outputs of the RDM process: 1. Long term preservation of datasets through archiving 2. Sharing and reuse of datasets for further research and other purposes in society at large. This proposal outlines the creation of a coherent Research Data Management organization at Lund University that utilizes existing resources both within and outside the university and establishes new organizational units and information systems, specific to this new task. We propose the establishment of a new unit for Research Data Management and Coordination at the University Library whose responsibility would be to coordinate the network of existing agents who support research activities such as faculty libraries and ethical, legal, archival and data management experts. We further propose the creation of a new information system, the Lund University Dataset Directory, which will facilitate management of datasets and information retrieval throughout the data lifecycle. We expect that research datasets could be deposited for sharing at national or disciplinary repositories and eventually archived when a solution is in place at the University Archive. Advanced RDM - like semantic web technologies - will require online data services not currently provided by national agents. We therefor propose a Data Laboratory within the RDM network at Lund University. Finally, it's important to recognize that Research Data Management is a new way of organizing information with its own set of tasks for the library organization. Our efforts in RDM will require us to invest significant effort in learning new systems, ways of working and collaboration

Internet based molecular collaborative and publishing tools

The scientific electronic publishing model has hitherto been an Internet based delivery of electronic articles that are essentially replicas of their paper counterparts. They contain little in the way of added semantics that may better expose the science, assist the peer review process and facilitate follow on collaborations, even though the enabling technologies have been around for some time and are mature. This thesis will examine the evolution of chemical electronic publishing over the past 15 years. It will illustrate, which the help of two frameworks, how publishers should be exploiting technologies to improve the semantics of chemical journal articles, namely their value added features and relationships with other chemical resources on the Web. The first framework is an early exemplar of structured and scalable electronic publishing where a Web content management system and a molecular database are integrated. It employs a test bed of articles from several RSC journals and supporting molecular coordinate and connectivity information. The value of converting 3D molecular expressions in chemical file formats, such as the MOL file, into more generic 3D graphics formats, such as Web3D, is assessed. This exemplar highlights the use of metadata management for bidirectional hyperlink maintenance in electronic publishing. The second framework repurposes this metadata management concept into a Semantic Web application called SemanticEye. SemanticEye demonstrates how relationships between chemical electronic articles and other chemical resources are established. It adapts the successful semantic model used for digital music metadata management by popular applications such as iTunes. Globally unique identifiers enable relationships to be established between articles and other resources on the Web and SemanticEye implements two: the Document Object Identifier (DOI) for articles and the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) for molecules. SemanticEye’s potential as a framework for seeding collaborations between researchers, who have hitherto never met, is explored using FOAF, the friend-of-a-friend Semantic Web standard for social networks

Practices of research data curation in institutional repositories: A qualitative view from repository staff

The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied. The paper can inform the development of best practice guides, infrastructure and service templates, as well as education in research data curation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools