da blog

Japanese Zen garden at Brunei gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies.

So another DPTP over! As presenters we felt it went really well. We again had a great group of people. The level of knowledge was very high and even so it seems the course really does help consolidate many levels of knowledge about digital preservation. For many it was OAIS and the class project seems to have helped put the theory into practice. One quote from the feedback:

‘Things really fell into place for me during this exercise and models started to make proper sense. Moved things from theory to practice.’

Overall the level of satisfaction with what we are providing is high.

‘Overall an excellent course. Bringing together so many disparate ideas and concepts and making sense of the muddle! Just hope we can move forward using the models. Excellent group too, good interaction and discussion – I got as much out of this element as from the taught content. Thank you so much all!’

We are now looking to developing links with the DCC as well as moving on to another stage of the DPTP. We will keep providing these 3 day courses with readjustments and updates but we are also looking at developing the modules into e-learning objects. Now all we need is funding!

This is the third and final post of mine summing up my notes from the 4th international digital curation conference (now a few weeks ago.) These notes cover the bulk of the second day, which consisted of submitted (as opposed to invited) papers. Most of these were given in parallel tracks, so I’m only able to cover half of them. As luck would have it, Chris Rusbridge seems to have covered many of the others.

The opening paper, however, was in its own session as it won the prize for best paper of the conference: Manjula Patel and Alexander Ball’s study on the issues surrounding the preservation of engineering CAD models was a useful guide to the problems and to possible solutions. One of the things that they opened my eyes to is that CAD files aren’t just about geometry and spatial representation – there’s lots of other information possibly embedded in them or attached to them, from engineering tolerances to feedback from the manufacturing process or field maintenance.

Aaron Griffiths then spoke about the RIN report looking at attitudes to data publishing across different disciplines (To Share or Not To Share: Publication and quality assurance of research data outputs) Read the rest of this entry »

My last post from IDCC4 ended with me being unable to report on John Wilbank’s closing keynote on day 1, so I’ll rectify that now with the benefit of handwritten notes and a little more time for reflection.

John is working on the Science Commons initiative which, through projects and advocacy, is taking the Creative Commons concepts and applying them to the doing of science, as well as the publishing of its outputs. (The DCC were drawing our attention to the initiative over 3 years ago.) He began with a view[1] that science is not unlike wikipedia: they are about publishing, in the sense of disclosure, advances are made by individual action and proceed by small, discrete steps, and trust ratings accrue from peer review. He also commented on the “tyranny of the crowd” effect that general search tools like Google suffer from: someone searching for information about spears (their manufacture, use, or “spears, the carrying and chucking of”) will be somewhat overwhelmed by the number of results relating to Britney. And from this he moved to a view that science, to advance further, requires a disruptive change to its practices that it is inherently resistant to. One thing that needs to change is the notion that science is communicated through periodic papers (itself an outdated metaphor), “units of knowledge which are adverts for years of work.” He observed that, even if we still want papers, we really want them with embedded (ideally semantic) linking and tagging. Yet, although we have the technology to do this in a semi-automated way, the licenses that apply to many e-journals explicitly prevent us from doing so.

He then moved to considering ways to improve openness of journals and their content: by giving incentives such as better statistics to those who publish in open journals, and through simple but effective tools such as the scholar’s copyright and addendum tool, Read the rest of this entry »

This is a brief and undigested report from day 1 of the DCC’s international digital curation conference taking place in Edinburgh. After a welcome from Chris Rusbridge (DCC director) and Professor Peter Clarke (NeSC director) we had a keynote from Professor David Porteous, a professor of human molecular genetics and medicine and a key player in Generation Scotland.

He began by illustrating the changes in health, disease and knowledge of causes that lie behind some of his work. Changes in scottish demography illustrate this: in 1911 everyone is young, numbers decline with age in a smooth curve. After WWII, in 1951, there is a flat bulge from ages 10 to 50 with a decline thereafter, whereas 2001 and 2031 sees a bulge in pensioners. There is a consequent rise in chronic disease: disease that treatments of today are not very effective for, unlike the killers of the past, where effective treatments contributed to the changes in age profile in the population that we are now seeing. He illustrated this with reference to the grim reapers road map: an atlas of mortality in the UK (and, as he said, a fine book title.) It showed cancer, heart and lung disease unequally distributed over the UK. Glasgow is particularly bad. Why? Nature and nurture both play a part, but other than smoking, we have very little evidence for the real effects underlying nurture causes such as diet variation. So his research concentrates on the nature aspect: what difference our genetic inheritance plays.

He then looked at changes in sequencing costs. From 1990-2003 the human genome project spent $3bn to do the first with machines spread over aircraft hangers; now one machine can do a genome for 500k, in the next year 5k. completegenomics plans 20,000 genomes at $5k each in 2010 using 60,000 processors and 30Pb of storage. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this whilst listening to Michael Day of UKOLN talk about preservation as one component of the data curation lifecycle espoused by the DCC. He is one of a number of people invited by the DCC to give lectures and create exercises as part of the pilot of DCC 101, a course aimed at researchers and the data curators who work with them.

I’m here because I was invited to speak this morning about Ingest, the previous stage in the lifecycle. That was followed by a stimulating set of exercises developed and led by Suzanne Embury which got attendees to think about data quality and the varied measures we might use for it. Suzanne’s exercise was based on work by Wang and Strong (“Beyond accuracy: what data quality means for data consumers”) which starts from the premise that we can never directly measure data quality – rather, we must construct measures which are proxies for quality, or measure only one facet of it. This was new work to me, but it was reassuring to see Read the rest of this entry »