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

Principles of data management and sharing at European Research Infrastructures

Under the umbrella of the BioMedBridges project, fourteen research infrastructures in the biological, biomedical and environmental sciences developed commonly agreed principles of data management and sharing. The document makes key recommendations on how data management and sharing via the research infrastructures can be supported and encouraged: The RIs encourage data sharing and reuse and support the notion that public funders should encourage Open Access to data from publicly funded research where possible. Some data may only be shared under certain conditions and with appropriate safekeeping mechanisms in place, such as personally identifiable data, data subject to ethical or legal restrictions, or restrictions for intellectual property protection. To encourage data sharing, systematic reward and recognition mechanisms are necessary. Proposals for publicly funded research at RIs should include a data management plan concerning the deposition of data in long-term archives that addresses specific resources and activities (including standardisation of data production and curation/annotation). Funding for tools and activities connected to data deposition must be available. Systems, services and resources must be in place to facilitate straightforward data deposition by researchers, including support concerning the necessary data use agreements and consent forms for data with data protection or intellectual property requirements. Systems are also needed to capture and track data provenance and use. To ensure necessary trust by data providers or depositors, RIs must guarantee high standards of security and traceability

Towards an Interoperable Ecosystem of Research Cohort and Real-world Data Catalogues Enabling Multi-center Studies

Objectives : Existing individual-level human data cover large populations on many dimensions such as lifestyle, demography, laboratory measures, clinical parameters, etc. Recent years have seen large investments in data catalogues to FAIRify data descriptions to capitalise on this great promise, i.e. make catalogue contents more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. However, their valuable diversity also created heterogeneity, which poses challenges to optimally exploit their richness. Methods : In this opinion review, we analyse catalogues for human subject research ranging from cohort studies to surveillance, administrative and healthcare records. Results : We observe that while these catalogues are heterogeneous, have various scopes, and use different terminologies, still the underlying concepts seem potentially harmonizable. We propose a unified framework to enable catalogue data sharing, with catalogues of multi-center cohorts nested as a special case in catalogues of real-world data sources. Moreover, we list recommendations to create an integrated community of metadata catalogues and an open catalogue ecosystem to sustain these efforts and maximise impact. Conclusions : We propose to embrace the autonomy of motivated catalogue teams and invest in their collaboration via minimal standardisation efforts such as clear data licensing, persistent identifiers for linking same records between catalogues, minimal metadata ‘common data elements’ using shared ontologies, symmetric architectures for data sharing (push/pull) with clear provenance tracks to process updates and acknowledge original contributors. And most importantly, we encourage the creation of environments for collaboration and resource sharing between catalogue developers, building on international networks such as OpenAIRE and research data alliance, as well as domain specific ESFRIs such as BBMRI and ELIXIR

Report of the Research Coordination Network RCN : OceanObsNetwork, facilitating open exchange of data and information

The OceanObsNetwork goals and objectives are to foster a broad, multi-disciplinary dialogue, enabling more effective use of sustained ocean observatories and observing systems. To achieve these, the activities for the RCN include a working group titled “Facilitating Open Exchange of Data and Information.” Within this area 3 task teams were created dealing with elements that impact on open exchange of data and information. This report examines the foundation of Open Data and its importance to the international community, science, innovation and jobs. While the goal may be similar, the paths to Open Data are varied and drawing together a pervasive approach will take time. There are however, near term steps, technical and social, that could have significant impacts. Stimulating interdisciplinary collaboration occurs through adoption of common standards for data exchange, creation of information brokering for improved discovery and access and working toward common or defined vocabularies. Simply finding other scientists’ data has been noted as a major barrier for research. Open Data impinges on existing reward systems and social interactions. Areas that need to be addressed are the academic reward system (in terms of promotion and resources), the peer review panels and grant selection processes (in terms of acknowledging the importance and challenge of data collection) and the needs for acceptable citation mechanisms. Intellectual property should not be abandoned in an Open Data environment and managing IPR is necessary. A sustainable Open Data Policy is essential and sustainability is a matter for all parties, government, private sector, academia and non-profit organizations. As full implementation of Open Data will involve a change in practices in a number of research and publication activities, an end-to-end perspective and strategy would most likely allow a long-term sustainable path to be pursued. Various business models are discussed in the paper that would not have been considered a decade ago. These range from cloud storage to publication of data with Digital Object Identifiers. These set a possible foundation for the future.National Science Foundation through Grant Award No. OCE-1143683