FEATURE
Data
‘ Good enough’ is not good enough
Managing research data well can open up the possibilities of valuable new insight with the help of linked data, writes Siân Harris
S
imon Hodson’s job remit throws up an interesting issue. Some of the key aspects of being programme manager – managing research data at JISC are to help researchers and institutions in the UK to manage their data better and to demonstrate the need for this. The interesting issue is why these tasks are
so necessary. Surely managing their data is of prime importance to researchers? Surely they don’t need somebody to demonstrate why this is required? At the simplest level, of course researchers do know that their data is important. However, managing data goes beyond making sure you keep the data behind your published – or soon to be published – research. And it also goes beyond ensuring that you know where you have stored your data. The projects that receive funding through
Hodson’s programme show that well- managed research data can have value far beyond what was originally thought of in an initial research project. Take
FISHNet, for example, a
collaboration between King’s College London and the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA). The first step of this project, which JISC funded, was to set up an archive of freshwater biological data and enhance it with metadata.
10 Research Information DEC 2012/JAN 2013 ‘In freshwater biology, datasets tend to be
created by individuals or small groups, often in Excel spreadsheets, and are usually created to answer a specific research question,’ explained Mark Hedges, director of the Centre for e-Research at King’s College, London. Bringing these datasets together in the same place starts to open up the possibility of getting integrated views. For example, someone might have taken water samples from one part of a lake while someone else took similar samples from another part of the lake. Bringing the data together makes it possible to start to get a picture of the whole lake. ‘We are looking at how to break information out of silos,’ said Hedges. This work was started by the follow-on project
FISH.Link, also funded by JISC, with the additional collaboration of the University of Manchester. King’s College London and the FBA are now working on a new project developing these
ideas, the DTC Archive project,
funded by Defra (the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). ‘We want to have cross-dataset querying,’ he noted, adding that the partners are looking at using RDF (Resource Description Framework, a framework for describing resources on the web) as an intermediate form.
Hedges and his colleagues have also
been working on another JISC-funded project
in the humanities. Named the
SPQR (Supporting Productive Queries for Research) project, this aimed to investigate the potential of linked data for integrating datasets related to classical antiquity. ‘Lots of the digital datasets that people have been creating for years lack interoperability and the opportunity to get an integrated view across them,’ said Hedges. ‘They were generally either relational databases or XML documents. Our approach is to transform them to RDF triples.’
Such projects show the potential of linked data and semantic enrichment in research. ‘The key is making it machine readable – at high levels of granularity and at scale,’ explained Hodson of JISC. ‘If we can link data we can derive insight of real social and economic benefit.’
The dangers of assumptions But there are some inevitable challenges that such projects show. In particular they highlight differences in the way data is collected and stored. In the SPQR project, for example, there were issues where some data used Latin letters and others used Greek and there were inconsistencies in the ways things like date were expressed. ‘It’s OK informally, but formally it is problematic,’ noted Hedges.
www.researchinformation.info
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