Experimental Data

Experimental_Data

 Restricted Access

-- work in progress --

Recommendations to the "Perspektiven Kommission"
Laurent Romary will provide a letter with recommendations

Proposed Actions

 * Identify one or two (simple) usecases where data is already structured and well described with metadata (e.g. spectrograms or videos). The processes and standards involved there could be transformed into a first draft of a document of "best practise" for these usecases. Ideally, these usecases should contain a core set of processes (or deal with datatypes) that are also used by other institutes/sections.
 * Put this data into CoLab in a transparent structure, so that a network of experts and a collection of expertise around this topic can be formed.
 * Actively disseminate those recommendations/best practises to all (or maybe topically close) institutes so that they can take advantage -- if not of the collected knowledge itself -- so at least of the infrastructure in place that lead to the first set of recommendations.
 * Create incentives for scientists to describe their primary data with "standardized" metadata, e.g. with an "Best documented dataset of the year"-Award.
 * Ease the documentation of experimental data with a toolset (still to be found) that can be adapted to the specific needs of the topic the scientist is working on. This way it could become possible to not only specify metadata for archival purposes, but also metadata to describe the contents of the dataset in more detail, e.g. to enable searches with a higher granularity.
 * Identify which tools, metadata-schema, processes, and workflows in data-modeling and data-curation for certain types of data already exist in the MPS or related societies, and -- if possible -- extract and emphasise those which are specific to a group of institutes, rather than specific to a single institute. The Gö*-Long Term Archiving (Gö* is a local cooperation of IT-institutes) workinggroup organized a workshop in 2006 on "speicherkonzepte" whose participants could be a first target group to address with such questions. The nestor network organized a mailing-list and a wiki for the partizipants. Many of them came from MPIs. For the workshop: http://www.gwdg.de/forschung/veranstaltungen/workshops/langzeitarchivierung/2006/index.html.
 * GWDG and RZG need to develop more complex storage strategies that include media migration strategies. Collecting existing strategies was the main objective of the above workshop, this should be continued by finding more MPIs that would like to contribute to the mailinglist or the wiki.
 * A cooperation with the nestor working group "Long Term Preservation, Grid, Escience" might be helpfull. Wolfgang Voges, Malte Dreyer and Dagmar Ullrich are already participating.
 * People form MPS could participate in the other nestor working groups, gaining a broader knowledge about existing LTA-activities.