The Research Data Alliance: Building Community & Infrastructure for Data Sharing World-wide

This presentation to Pitt and CMU library faculty & staff on data sharing and the Research Data Alliance was given during Open Access Week 2015, jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh on Thursday, October 22, 11:00am - 12:00pm at the Mellon Institute Conference Room (MI 348), Carnegie Mellon University. Three years ago, the Research Data Alliance (rd-alliance.org) was launched as a community-driven international organization with a mission to develop social and technical infrastructure that supports and accelerates data sharing world-wide. Since its launch, the RDA has grown precipitously and now has over 3100 members from 100+ countries. U.S. Chair Francine Berman discusses the opportunities and challenges of sharing research data, and describes RDA’s global efforts to build an agile and functional organization, a broad and cohesive community, and a pipeline of impact-focused infrastructure adopted by individuals, projects and organizations to solve problems. ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Francine Berman is the Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2009, she was the inaugural recipient of the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award for “influential leadership in the design, development, and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure.” Dr. Berman is U.S. lead of the Research Data Alliance (RDA). She also serves as Chair of the Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees, as co-Chair of the NSF Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Sloan Foundation, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Dr. Berman has served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and as Vice President for Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She also served as co-Chair of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI), as co-Chair of the US-UK Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, and Chair of the Information, Computing and Communication Section (Section T) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized by the Library of Congress as a “Digital Preservation Pioneer”, as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek and Newsweek, and as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum

What Do We Know About The Stewardship Gap?

In the 21st century, digital data drive innovation and decision-making in nearly every field. However, little is known about the total size, characteristics, and sustainability of these data. In the scholarly sphere, it is widely suspected that there is a gap between the amount of valuable digital data that is produced and the amount that is effectively stewarded and made accessible. The Stewardship Gap Project (http://bit.ly/stewardshipgap) seeks to investigate characteristics of and measure the stewardship gap for sponsored scholarly activity in the United States. This paper presents a preliminary definition of the stewardship gap based on a review of relevant literature and investigates areas of the stewardship gap for which metrics have been developed and measurements made, and where work to measure the stewardship gap is yet to be done. The main findings presented are 1) there is not one stewardship gap but rather multiple “gaps” that contribute to whether data is responsibly stewarded; 2) there are relationships between the gaps that can be used to guide strategies for addressing the stewardship gap; and 3) there are imbalances in the types and depths of studies that have been conducted to measure the stewardship gap.Alfred P. Sloan Foundationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/122726/1/StewardshipGap_Final.pdfDescription of StewardshipGap_Final.pdf : Main articl

The Stewardship Gap: A Challenge in Long-Term Access to Data

Despite broad consensus among many in the scientific research, data, and policy communities about the importance of preserving and sharing research data, there are significant concerns about the adequacy of measures being taken today to enable these activities. The difference between current activities and best or ideal policies and practices constitutes a gap that this article describes: the stewardship gap—a gap that will require innovative strategies by researchers, research organizations, and research sponsors to address. The authors interviewed 46 active researchers, drawn from a variety of scientific domains, to understand their perspectives on the value of their research data, the length of time their data would remain valuable, and the kind and extent of commitments in place to ensure ongoing preservation of valuable data. In all, the researchers provided descriptions, valuations, and prospective plans for 120 datasets produced in 46 projects. Four concepts are valuable for understanding our findings: the kinds of commitment researchers receive from data stewards; who takes responsibility for stewardship; the value of the data as perceived by the researcher and others; and the length of time over which data are valuable and commitments exist. Based on this study as a representation of the larger cohort of data created with federal and foundation R&D support, research data are "at risk." This is especially so when data are valuable and the length of time for which there is a preservation commitment is less than the length of time that the data will have value. Closing gaps in commitment and responsibility is essential if valuable data are to be effectively preserved. This calls for clear policy directives from government agencies and other research sponsors in partnership with research-performing institutions, designation and acceptance of responsibility, and supporting human and financial investments for the research data the community deems as valuable.Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; University of Colorado Boulderhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146759/6/Stewardship Gap Article for deep blue-updated January 2019.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146759/1/Stewardship Gap Article for Deep Blue.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146759/2/Stewardship Gap Supplemental Materials for Deep Blue.pdf1517137Description of Stewardship Gap Article for deep blue-updated January 2019.pdf : Main Article (January 2019)Description of Stewardship Gap Article for Deep Blue.pdf : Previous VersionDescription of Stewardship Gap Supplemental Materials for Deep Blue.pdf : Supplemental Material

Representing Graph Families with Edge Grammars

An edge grammar is a formal mechanism for representing families of related graphs (binary trees, hypercubes, meshes, etc.). Given an edge grammar, larger graphs in the family are derived from simple basis graphs using edge rewriting rules. A drawback to many graph grammars is that they cannot represent some important, highly regular graph families such as the family of shuffie-exchange graphs. Edge grammars, however, exist for all "computable " graph families, and simple edge gramma.rs exist for most regular graph families. In this paper, we define and illuskate edge grammars and analyze them in the context of formal language theory. Our results include hierarchy and decidability properties. Since this work originally was motivated by a need to represent graph families found in parallel computation, the application of edge grammars in this context is also discussed

What Do We Know about the Stewardship Gap

In the 21st century, digital data drive innovation and decision-making in nearly every field. However, little is known about the total size, characteristics, and sustainability of these data. In the scholarly sphere, it is widely suspected that there is a gap between the amount of valuable digital data that is produced and the amount that is effectively stewarded and made accessible. The Stewardship Gap Project (http://bit.ly/stewardshipgap) investigates characteristics of, and measures, the stewardship gap for sponsored scholarly activity in the United States. This paper presents a preliminary definition of the stewardship gap based on a review of relevant literature and investigates areas of the stewardship gap for which metrics have been developed and measurements made, and where work to measure the stewardship gap is yet to be done. The main findings presented are 1) there is not one stewardship gap but rather multiple “gaps” that contribute to whether data is responsibly stewarded; 2) there are relationships between the gaps that can be used to guide strategies for addressing the various stewardship gaps; and 3) there are imbalances in the types and depths of studies that have been conducted to measure the stewardship gap

Will Today’s Data Be Here Tomorrow? Measuring The Stewardship Gap

Stakeholders in scholarly research are paying increased attention to stewardship of digital research data¹ for the purposes of advancing scientific discovery, driving innovation, and promoting trust in science and scholarship. However, little is known about the total amounts, characteristics, and sustainability of data that could be used for these purposes. The Stewardship Gap is an 18-month project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to understand issues in defining metrics for and measuring the stewardship gap: the potential gap between the amount of valuable data produced through sponsored projects in the United States and the amount that is effectively stewarded and made accessible. This paper reports on the first phase of the project, which sought to develop an instrument to gather information about research data sustainability from a broad variety of researchers and research disciplines and make progress toward the ultimate goals of 1) shedding light on the size, characteristics, and sustainability of valuable sponsored research data and creative work in the United States, and 2) recommending actions stakeholders can take to address the stewardship gap if one is found to exist

Separation of Test-Free Propositional Dynamic Logics over Context-Free Languages

For a class L of languages let PDL[L] be an extension of Propositional Dynamic Logic which allows programs to be in a language of L rather than just to be regular. If L contains a non-regular language, PDL[L] can express non-regular properties, in contrast to pure PDL. For regular, visibly pushdown and deterministic context-free languages, the separation of the respective PDLs can be proven by automata-theoretic techniques. However, these techniques introduce non-determinism on the automata side. As non-determinism is also the difference between DCFL and CFL, these techniques seem to be inappropriate to separate PDL[DCFL] from PDL[CFL]. Nevertheless, this separation is shown but for programs without test operators.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2011, arXiv:1106.081

Historical Missionary Activity, Schooling, and the Reversal of Fortunes: Evidence from Nigeria

This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission stations in Nigeria, we find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to greater missionary activity have higher levels of schooling. This effect is robust to omitted heterogeneity, ethnicity fixed effects, and reverse causation. We find inter-generational factors and the persistence of early advantages in educational infrastructure to be key channels through which the effect has persisted. Consistent with theory, the effect of missions on current schooling is larger for population subgroups that have historically suffered disadvantages in access to education