Supporting Sustainable Access to Scientific Data through Metadata

Chairs: Jian Qin and Raed Sharif
School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

The practice of science has changed in the last three decades due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies and massive increases in computing capacity. As the International Council for Science (ICSU) describes in its recently released five-year strategic plan, there is more scientific data and information openly available than ever before. This environment enables scientists around the world access to the most up-to-date data and information from his or her desktop. “Secondary analyses of data, and the combining of data from multiple sources, are opening up exciting new scientific horizons. Scientific publication practices are changing rapidly.” (ICSU, 2005, 16-17)

Numerous workshops and conferences have been organized to explore the policy, socioeconomic, and management issues in sharing and managing scientific data on national and international scales, including the CODATA Workshop on Archiving Scientific and Technical Data in 2002, International Symposium on Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science in 2003, the CODATA-ERPANET Archiving Workshop in 2003, the International Workshop on Strategies for Preservation of and Open Access to Scientific Data in 2004, and the International Workshop on Strategies for Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Southern Africa in 2005.

These discussions share a consensus that scientific data need metadata for access and archiving purposes. Although metadata standards for scientific data have been developed in the United States since the early times of computer networks, there are gaps between the fast growth of scientific data and metadata representation. Today there are more data generated than cataloged, and the inadequacies in metadata tools and lack of trained metadata personnel are making the challenge even tougher.

We propose a panel on metadata to support sustainable access to scientific data. Supporting “sustainable access,” implies that metadata should be created to: 1) document the quality and provenance of scientific data, 2) describe data characteristics for discovery and retrieval purposes, and 3) state intellectual property rights and proper use. The panel brings experts from information science and scientific disciplines to discuss issues on policy and business practices for metadata deployment, interdisciplinary collaboration, and technical management.

The first presentation will give a general introduction to developments and challenges in metadata for scientific data, with a focus on metadata deployment in data archiving and access.

The second presentation addresses metadata policy and interdisciplinary collaboration. These are the two factors among others that can significantly impact the deployment of scientific data metadata. These issues include business and operational aspects of access. Sustainable access from a business point view needs both funding and effective operations for metadata operations. Whose responsibility is in providing funding support for metadata operations? How might the requisite resources and practices be developed? Is there a need to build an international consortium for managing and coordinating metadata efforts? These are just a few questions that need to be addressed for sustainable access.

Interoperable metadata for scientific data is important to ensure data sharing and cross-disciplinary retrieval of data. To serve the need for describing scientific data, metadata standards have been created for data sources in different disciplines. Metadata standards in different countries also vary in language and structure. The third presentation will address issues in metadata interoperability across disciplines, geographic regions, languages, and data collections.

The last presentation addresses issues related to metadata and multilingualism. It particularly focuses on the developing and least developed countries scientists’ access to scientific data, the language barrier to full and efficient utilization of this data, and the need to design and deploy metadata in a way that reduces this barrier. The presentation concludes by identifying current efforts and some future actions in this area.

References

ICSU. (2005). Strengthening international science for the benefit of society: A strategic plan for the International Council of Science 2006-2011. Retrieved 2/2/2006 from: http://www.icsu.org/Gestion/img/ICSU_DOC_DOWNLOAD/863_DD_FILE_ICSU_Strategic_Plan.pdf