Vision for academic geographic data access

Dr David Medyckyj-Scott

GRADE Project Director

EDINA

Pull Factors: Data sharing – Why do it?

According to OECD Follow Up Group On Issues of Access to Publicly Funded Research Data1…

“More widespread and efficient access to and sharing of research data will have substantial benefits for most areas of scientific research.”

1 Interim Report, 20 October 2002

Access to and sharing of data…

• reinforces open scientific inquiry• encourages diversity of analysis and opinion • promotes new research • makes possible the testing of new or alternative

hypotheses and methods of analysis• supports studies on data collection methods and

measurement • facilitates the education of new researchers • enables the exploration of topics not envisioned by the

initial investigators, and• permits the creation of new data sets when data from

multiple sources are combined.

Finally…

“Sharing and open access to publicly funded research data will help maximize the potential of new digital technologies and networks, and provide greater returns both in knowledge and economy from the public investment in research.”

Digital data resources are becoming a central pillar of scientific research

• Data volumes are increasing exponentially, as too is the complexity of the data itself; this will be magnified by the spread of new technologies

• Once collected, the same set of standardised digital research data now could be used by a variety of researchers from different institutes and disciplines, at the times and places convenient to the individual users

• A significant amount of scientific work is conducted on previously collected data

– no documentary evidence (?) on how far this is true for geospatial data

• Active management required to meet basic needs of access and re-use

• To be shared– data needs to be found and retrieved

– understood within and across disciplines

– re-use must be (technically) possible

– needs to happen efficiently, fairly and affordably

Research Councils situation

• ESRC has made a strategic decision to collect and preserve data– “this now represents quite a large overhead, both in terms of capital

and recurrent costs, and is a long-term commitment”

• ESRC and NERC require datasets created through research funding to be deposited with data archives or data centres

• Documentary evidence of re-use is limited– “Level of re-use of data held in the AHDS and ESRC archives has

been disappointingly low” (Alison Allden, 2003)

– “NERC spends about £5 million per annum on data management, but unclear what benefit it derives from this. More research is needed to establish benefits and value of data re-use” (Mark Thorley, 2003)

– Qualidata survey of qualitative data re-use (2000). 44% respondents used colleague's data rather than acquiring archived data via a dissemination service (33%)

A push factor

• JISC Geo-data browser project (Go-Geo!)

– long gestation period!– interested in un-owned data after

the end of project, PhD/MSc thesis, teaching exercise

• Difficult to move from ‘Discover’ and ‘Locate’ to ‘Access’ and ‘Use’

• Also significant barriers to metadata creation

– need for mechanism by which data could be shared

– concerns over data ownership, IPR and copyright particularly with regard to derived data

(Some of the) Issues

• What types of data?• Do we need to control what data is made available for re-use?• What’s the relationship to curation/preservation?• Is geospatial data special when it comes to sharing?• How do with Digital Rights?• What information do we require for re-use and sharing?• What role for standards and which?• How do we manage changes in the data?• Replication v. redundancy• How do we discover, locate, access, use, publish (and curate)

the data?

Discuss these and others more today…

So what is the vision?

• What are the requirements?

• What are the possible architectures?• A centralised subject repository

• Distributed (federated) repositories (a virtual data centre)

• Institutional repositories

• Informal approach based around P2P, web pages, ??

• What form of governance is needed?

• What sorts of policies need to be put in place?

Again, discuss this further today

• Where do repositories fit into the bigger picture?

Geo

-D

ata

EDINA

Proprietary Service

A ‘traditional’ online service

WFS Service

WAAS Service

WAAS Client

WMS Service

Geo

-D

ata

WMS ServiceG

eo-

Dat

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Dat

ase

t2

Dat

ase

t 1

NationalData

Centre

Research Council Institute

A Web Services based Service (ie OGC like)

NationalData

Centre

?

Via a Repository (ies)

Questions?