While data is the cornerstone of scientific research, traditional mechanisms of research assessment overlook these data outputs, instead focusing solely on publications. However, publications are just the tip of the iceberg: in reality, science is based on a complex landscape of research data and activities, which can be published or shared beyond traditional journal articles. Information scientists and software engineers are now working to relate and make accessible all of this data for research networking, research evaluation, resource sharing, and hypothesis discovery. Furthermore, federal funding agencies are increasing their requirements for data sharing and data standardization. Researchers, though, are often largely unaware of data standardization efforts and tools to access shared data.
In order to deal with this onslaught of data, standards, and tools, universities are asking libraries to play an increasing role in information management strategies. This includes training, data housing, and dissemination of information about tool resources. Libraries are at a key intersection between the research community and semantic engineers, and are increasingly hiring specialists with a research background to provide data modeling, curation, and scientific information dissemination services. As a result, libraries have been working closely with the research community to build and integrate semantic tools into the entire research cycle. Librarians can help researchers understand ways to interpret and share their data, and use tools to query the large amounts of existing data.
Scientific disciplines may be defined, and are sometimes separated, by their disparate types of data, but libraries are versed in bringing it all together. In this presentation, we will first discuss challenges that exist in analysis, interpretation, and storage of data related to researcher expertise. We subsequently examine the unique linkages in the scientific community that semantic connections create. Such linkages have already been used to promote collaboration, but can have many purposes. We believe libraries are well-poised to facilitate and nurture investigations driven by semantic technologies.
Original slides can be found at:
These slides are lightly annotated (my original slides are not very text heavy and lack context if you haven't seen me present them before). Additionally, these have been converted from Slideshare, and they don't normally look so crappy...