AGILE 2018 Workshop

Research Data Management and Reference Datasets for the Environmental Sciences

Abstract:

To make scientific work more transparent and in the optimal case even reproducible, the improvement of research documentation is a clear goal in most of the scientific domains and in particular in the data driven environmental sciences. Several national, European and international initiatives and activities evolved to tackle issues in research data management, several of them started quite recently (e.g. GO-FAIR, European Open Science Cloud, Research Data Alliance). Nowadays, research-funding agencies very often demand project proposals to define a data management plan that includes strategies for data description and publication. To support this, a number of research data infrastructures have been implemented at national and international level (for example: www.pangaea.de). However, most of them focus only on the publication of scientific data that is seen an additional or supplemental output to the published publications. A real data management that also supports the daily work of the researchers is usually not offered. Further, to improve comparability among the different research results the availability of reference datasets that serve as harmonized data input or as a mean of reference or comparison do hardly exist. As a next step towards research transparency these things are clearly demanded.

This workshop provides an opportunity for interested researchers to share experiences and discuss requirements on reference datasets and tools and platforms for research data management.

Objectives:

The specific objectives of this half-day workshop (3 hours in total) are:

• To discuss state-of-the-art and promising developments in research data management and reference datasets.
• To discuss the complexity of common data management in researcher's daily work.
• To discuss what a reference data set is and how domain-specific datasets can look like.

Agenda:

The planned agenda for the half-day workshop (3 hours in total) is as follows:

• 9:30 - Welcome (5min)
• 9:35 – Invited presentations (4x20min) 
  • Topics: Research Data Management and Reference Datasets
    1. Lars Bernard – Research Data Management in Environmental Sciences - An overview
    2. Simon Jirka – Research Data Management - A COLABIS point-of-view
    3. Harry Lankreijer,  Lund University (Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science) – Research Data Management at the ICOS Carbon Portal
    4. Stephan Mäs – Reference Datasets - An Introduction and Overview
• 11:00 - Breakout Session
  • Research Data Management
    • What are specific requirements  for RDM from a geoinformatics/environmental sciences point-of-view?
    • Are there any RDM best practices in your country?
    • Are there any specific RDM–platforms or services for environmental sciences available at the country level? What are the latest developments?
    • Is there a common European point-of-view on RDM and related GI Science aspects?
    • Where is AGILE's role in RDM?
    • Which SDI services and functionalities could potentially support RDM in Europe?
  • Reference Datasets
    • Is there a common awareness for the need for RDs in environmental sciences?
    • What are typical global and European reference datasets for environmental sciences? Which reference datasets exist (e.g. Corine LC and SRTM) and which are required?
    • How are the existing RDs made  available - and what makes them a RD?
    • How to best support - organizationally and technically - the development and qualification of RDs?
    • What can be AGILE's role as an enabler for RDs?
• 12:00 - Presentation and discussion of the Breakout Session Results (2x10min)
• 12:25 - Closing

Organizing commitee:

• Stephan Mäs, Daniel Henzen, Lars Bernard – TU Dresden, Germany
• Ivo Senner - Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, Germany
• Simon Jirka - 52°North GmbH, Germany