Preservation and Stewardship Committee Telecon 2014-04-11

RDA

Ruth provided a summary from the 3rd RDA plenary.  There was about 480 people, she felt it was a good meeting.  One anecdote, in Australia they developed a national level data infrastructure before requiring researchers to write data management plans and noted that doing it any other way was putting the cart before the horse.  

She attended a session on domain repositories.  They hope to ensure that RDA results meet the needs of actual repositories - to know what they are doing and what is happening as well as to push successful results back out to the community.  There is a small movement towards best practices, they have a mailing list on the RDA website.  Probably not a high volume activity, but something this group might be interested in.

Also she attended the e-preservation infrastructure interest group.  They would like to create three possible working groups.  Working groups come up with deliverables in 12-18 months.  Something they can actually demonstrate.  

The three this group would like to work on is 1) set of service levels and services for bit-level preservation that could be a global set of standards, 2) representation information and what do you do when things change (who is doing what where and what are best practices) 3) PCCS - not clear if a lot of groups knew of this activity or if other groups are doing that sort of activity, and perhaps a group could be developed to see who is doing what where and if there is a reasonable amount of people working in this area, create best practices.  Can also join this list on the RDA website.  

Ruth was the only US representative to this interest group, most were from Australia or Europe.  

RDA has a group for citing data with precision.  They are looking to gather use cases (https://rd-alliance.org/groups/data-citation-wg/wiki/use-cases-pilots-precise-citation-data.html)  They are encouraging people to put use cases on their site.  Perhaps a small pilot on the ESIP testbed.  Ruth thought we could put in the NASA MODIS one that was discussed last month.  But if anyone else feels they have an example - precise and leading to data, she encourages you to submit them.  They are doing little studies of data, and what would it mean to do a precise study using it?  So with MODIS, pick one data set, and put the database with metadata on here to see what happens when a new MODIS data granule comes in.  What would a system have to report to precisely permit citing of its data.

Testbed proposals are due on April 30th.  

http://testbed.esipfed.org/node/2294

5-10K.  Ruth mentioned that it could be used on a little test, write a paper and do something with a student.  Anne asked for information about writing one of these proposals.  See Christine's recent ESIP all email for more information.  Ruth would be happy to work with someone on this, but they would have to do the bulk of the work.  Anne said she could not work on the MODIS work, but is interested.  Anne mentioned a data server access tool which can subset and aggregate (eventually) filters on data to do mathematical and statistical processes.  It might be useful for citations.  Ruth mentioned a need for a provenance trail as well, citing the data and the tool.  The date, the version of the software which was running etc.  Ruth suggested putting out a call for students if needed for projects.

Anne asked about the RDA meeting - Ruth mentioned using data to make decisions, and was wondering where that presentation might be, who the speaker was etc.  She is not sure if they were recorded.

Ruth mentioned that she was on an email list for a FOSTER group which is looking for data management training materials.  She thought that she would advertise the ESIP data management short courses.  She submitted it through their online form. This is for the FOSTER project which is getting data management training for the research community.

Summer meeting

Ruth submitted an abstract for the general planning.  And the US Global change group have submitted an abstract.  And the third one, a reporting session (to report on activities) has also been submitted.  Bob asked for more information about the reporting session - who would be reporting, and if we would be inviting people to do so.  And that we should figure that out before the summer meeting - so we need a discussion on who would be reporting.  http://commons.esipfed.org/node/2323 - the various activies can be seen in the abstract.

Ruth looked over the list and discussed who might do what:

• Provenance and Context Content Standard

• Physical Object Stewardship

• Identifiers

• Citations

• Data Management Training

• Preservation Ontology

• Data Stewardship Principles

There was a discussion on the identifiers and what might be reported out about this topic.  Anne and Bob had some comments about various work done with DOIs.  Bob said he could talk about their implementation of DOIs if that was helpful.  Anne mentioned the recommendations on landing pages and Vicky had a report back on that as well.  Ruth suggested Vicky and Bob present on their activities.

Once a full suite of presenters and topics is determined, we should update the abstract to include this information.  Bob asked if they should add them themselves but Ruth said she would manage it.  Send her specific titles if you have them.

Sarah said she might not be able to make any progress with the use cases as she is working on her dissertation proposal.

Rama would be on PCCS.

Bruce does not have time to work on the collection structures as he has to finish his book.

Nancy would be on data management and Ruth would ask her about that.

Ontologies - that is Hook, and Ruth would need to send him a question about that.

Bob asked how much time each person would have, Ruth estimated about 10 minutes.  There are a few questionable topics, if people do not have anything to present then there might be more time.

Anne said she could provide an update about the data study.  Ruth asked if she is going to do her own session.  They are having a telecon with BRDI and will decide then if they will have their own session.

Ruth will update us with the results of this and how long each person will have to present.

Summary of the status of papers

We have three papers working on:

1. The Science one has been submitted and is being sent out for a deeper review.

2. The second one, the DLIB one, Ruth is doing a consistency edit, the materials are all there and it is a bit long with obvious tells of different authors and is making it ready to submit.  

3. The last one is the EOS article we had not started yet.  The purpose was to publicise the PCCS and that NASA has used it as a requirement.  This would be a short piece to talk about the success.  Rama etc. needs to be an author on that.  Ruth asked if we had a group of people who had agreed to be authors.  Bob said he would agree to help, but we could not remember if there was a formal list of authors.  Ruth expects that the article would not get started until the summer meeting or after it.

Data Citations

Our data citations guidelines are getting a lot of good traction.  But one thing we have not done and said we would do, is we said we also in addition to providing guidelines for archives, we would create guidelines for journals and reviewers.  We have seen one good example of publisher guidelines for their journal, and Ruth is wondering if we should use that as a starting point and make some recommended guidelines for journal editors?  Bob thought if we targeted editors rather than publishers we might be able to focus on some specific things editors can look for and request from authors.  Which was exactly what Ruth was thinking.  Bob thinks this is a good idea.  Ruth said the AGU guidelines were a good start, and perhaps for our next meeting we can spend time on this topic and review these guidelines and how it might apply to different communities. If we can come up with guidelines, they might use them!  Bob said it would be good for those on editorial boards or people doing reviews to make sure the data is cited correctly.  It is a new activity that we have not worked on yet.

Other topics?