JISC launch workshop #jiscmrd 22nd October

Yesterday, Liz Lyon and myself attending a JISC workshop where we met up with a large number of other colleagues representing projects in the JISC Managing Research Data strand of activity #jiscmrd.

JISC Managing Research Data Workshop, 22nd October 2010 about to get underway

In this blog post I am focusing on the outcomes of the breakout group that I joined in the afternoon, which was perhaps the most interesting part of the day for me, and which I felt concluded by suggesting some concrete outcomes for good joint activity between projects:

• We identified a common interest in the use of OAI-ORE to describe aggregates of research data and related components that together make up a research object. There may be potential for joint efforts around tooling, and future meetings to share experiences, with a role for JISC to facilitate this (perhaps linking us up with international efforts).
• Domain ontologies drawn from the different domains we are working in will need to be inter-linked with more generic ontologies, like OAI-ORE or the OPM.
• We identified a common need to understand what appears to be a hierarchy (or stack) of ontologies that will need to be combined to meet the different needs in the various projects. We would like to share experiences on how to combine these effectively.
• We agreed to use a collaborative approach to sharing knowledge on these ontologies, with each of us contributing in the areas where we had most experience. We will use a wiki as a working area to pool resources and reviews, avoiding duplication of effort across projects.
• Similarly we will plan to publish finished reviews on the various standards, for the benefit of the community at large, using KnowledgeBlog.
• We will continue discussions around ontologies for research data on the JISCmail lists, and announce news of activities, in order to reach any other projects who were at the meeting but attending other break out groups. The tag #mrdonto will be used to tag posts and to capture the topic of interest identified by our group.
• We identified a common interest in using ORCID for researcher (or contributor) identification, and we would welcome JISC leadership to involve and represent us as a community within initiatives such as ORCID, to ensure they meet requrements for data. We think that between us we could offer a significant mass of adoption for ORCID; compatibility of ORCID with linked data was a priority for all those present.
• We share an interest in services to assign identifiers to data (with a focus on DataCite); once again compatibility with linked data was rated highly in our requirements for interoperability with the approaches that the projects are taking.

Disclaimer: this is my take on the outcome from the breakout, I welcome any corrections or clarifications from others in the group. Comments on the blog are welcome but please note I will be unable to moderate comments in the short term.

Over all, I felt this was one of the more productive JISC all-project meetings I have ever attended, it was heartening to see such a good number of people working within broadly the same aim, and I have made a number of valuable connections which will help to take things forward for SageCite.