Question 1: What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?
The landscape of information and data flows and repositories is multifaceted. Peer reviewed journals and scientific conferences are still the basis of scholarly communication, but science blogs and social community platforms become increasingly important. Research data are now increasingly managed using advanced technologies and sharing of raw data has become an important issue.
This topic thread will address and discuss details about the types of information that need to be shared in our domain, e.g.:
Information residing in communications between individuals, such as in blogs and
community platforms supported by sources such as directories of people and
institutions;
Formal scientific data collections as published data sets and their associated
metadata and quality indicators, peer-reviewed scholarly journals or document
repositories;
Knowledge „derivatives‟ such as collections of descriptions of agricultural
technologies, learning object repositories, expertise databases, etc.; And surely more...
There are several interesting examples of successful data exchange between distributed datasets, and some of them in the area of agricultural research and innovation. There are also ambitious attempts that still have to live up to expectations. A common characteristic of most examples is that they are based on specific ad-hoc solutions more than on a general principle or architecture, thus requiring coordination between "tightly coupled" components and limiting the possibilities of re-using the datasets anywhere and of replicating the experiment.
In some areas there are global platforms for sharing and interoperability. Some of these address the need to access scholarly publications, mostly those organized by the publishers, and others address the interfacing of open archives. With regard to standards and services in support of interoperability, there are several very successful initiatives, each dealing with different data domains. Among document repositories, the most successful initiative is surely the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting used by a global network of open archives. The strength of this movement is changing the face of scholarly publishing. Geospatial and remote sensing data have strong communities that have developed a number of wildly successful standards such as OGC that have in turn spurred important open source projects such as GeoServer. Finally, in relation to statistics from surveys, censuses and time-series, there has been considerable global cooperation among international organizations leading to initiatives such as SDMX and DDI, embraced by the World Bank, IMF, UNSD, OECD and others.
Singer System1, GeoNetwork2, and GeneOntology Consortium3 are examples of successful initiatives to create mechanisms for data exchange within scientific communities. The SDMX4 initiative aims to create a global exchange standard for statistical data.
There are more examples, but these advanced systems cannot have a strong impact on the average (smaller, less capacitated) agricultural information systems, because overall there are no easy mechanisms and tools for information systems developers to access, collect and mash up data from distributed sources. An infrastructure of standards, web sevices and tools needs to be created.
1 Singer System http://singer.cgiar.org/ Last accessed March 2011
2 GeoNetwork http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home Last accessed March 2011
3 GeneOntology Consortium http://www.geneontology.org/ Last accessed March 2011
4 SDMX http://sdmx.org/ Last accessed March 201
I agree with you, even in my country (Madagascar) the situation is like that.
I like the focus on LOD and RSS in the above posts. And also the mention of integrated relational "content models".
The difficulty is sometimes in sharing highly structured and integrated information in a simple way (like RSS) while retaining the relationships across different systems, but I'm sure this will be the subject of another discussion in another more technical thread of this e-consultation.
In reply to the question of "What needs to be shared", I think that it is not always obvious to imagine what can be useful to others. An Institution that produces scientific publications and manages projects in the area of plant diseases may decide to share only peer-reviewed articles, final project outputs and a list of projects, and then maybe what a certain extensionist in the field is looking for is a picture of a specific plant disease or the addresses of plant clinics in a certain country. That Institution may have had that picture in some project documentation and some addresses of plant clinics in its contact lists, but perhaps those "information objects" were not considered worth sharing. So the full potential of the information owned by the Institution is not exploited.
(I am speaking here independently of technical difficulties and other constraints in setting up a sharing environment, only focussing on "what needs to be shared")
What I mean is that we don't necessarily need to make an assessment of the usefulness of certain "information products" at the source level (except for a quality assessment of course): thanks to intelligent aggregators, consumer services and the final user can decide what information to assemble and from where.
But in order for intelligent aggregators to work, what matters is the "re-usability" (already mentioned by Diane above) of the information we share:
the more granularly we structure our contents (identifying the smallest possible information units), the better can other services re-use it and re-package it for different end-users.
So in my opinion any potentially useful piece of information is worth sharing, possibly as small information units with metadata, like single records (e.g. the name and specialization of an expert, or scientific data on a gene), single electronic resources (e.g. pictures or videos), even single semantic units automatically extracted from an article...
We can not ignore mundane issues. The aim of this and similar initiatives is to motivate people to make things public that they did not untill now. To do so with datasets public requires work. The originators have to add metadata for discovery, and document the data. i.e. explain how it was collected, what the parameters are, which files there are and what their technical format is, etc. DDI was mentioned in the introduction, it is one of the initiatives to standardoze that process at least for the socual sciences. So we have to think about the incentives. Scientists are much more pressed than they used to be say twenty years ago, struggling with time registry forms and competing for funds. They write publications anyway, and apart from the with to share discoveries they do so for their scientific reputation, so indirectly to gain a next round of funding. There is not necessarily a convergence of interest with commercial publishers. With the exception of textbooks authors of scientific works do not get paid better if more copies of their works are sold. So one can at least argue that open access publishing may make their work more visible, and therefore may help with their reputation . I hope that these discussions will help justifying that scientists or their institutions invest in data curation. Therefore we should think about priorities, and as our colleague from the Global Rust Foundation said, potential audiences.
Friends:
The starter piece is a well-formulated one. It does a good job of classifying what is shareable in three neat categories.
In my limited experience in supporting knowledge management in international agricultural research for about a decade, I found that there were many well-meaning initiatives in data sharing that did not get far even after many years. My understanding is that experts concerned might have been looking for technology solutions to emerge from within the international agricultural research sector, and it is not likely to happen. New synergies and relationships with what I can call "non-traditional" partners, such as a host of research institutions in ICT sector in developed as well as developing countries will be necessary.
I would thus tend to look at sharing transactional information (involving individuals and groups) and "derivatives" such as expert directories, learning material repositories, extension-oriented pieces and research documents as priority areas where a new paradigm in sharing can emerge. I can think of some interesting ongoing initiatives from which useful insights can be derived for future action.
Balaji
I could not agree more with VBALAJI.
The information needs of every audience is different.
What farmers need are more information / knowledge packed products, while on the other hand, extensionists and researchers might be also interested on some raw data from which they can move forward.
More importantly, the focus should also be on misinterpretation. Imagine a grass root audience getting hold of partial information or data from an incomplete project. There is a high risk of negative interpretation - from partial data or partial conceptualisation.
Therefore, we need not only to prioritise / categorise information but also, we need to be clear at WHAT STAGE of an results / information production process can data be shared and with whom?
-Regards-
Sanjay from Mauritius
Greetings everyone,
I am John Fereira from Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University. I've been working with CIARD and am a member of the CIARD Content Management Task Force and have recently done quite a bit of work on the CIARD RING site. Rather than engage too much in the dicussion right now I'm going to wait until some of the later topics. I had a bit of an incident yesterday (a house fire) that has me out of work for at least a day or so. I've got some minor burns but am otherwise fine as our the rest of my family. I do have some things that I want to contribute in regards to OAI-PMH and other CIARD RING, and information sharing technologies we're working with but I'll keep reading for and add my input over the next few days.
I would also think to consider asking "with whom are we sharing this information?"
Are we assuming that everyone that needs/wants access to data has the same technological profile? It seems like this discussion is framed along the lines of one person has database X and another person has database Y, how do we share information between those two systems. But what the user that has neither database X or Y, simply a web browser and a question?
As an example, I work with the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative (www.globalrust.org) and we are currently trying to synthesize data from many other institutions so that the end-users (breeders and farmers) will only have to go to one place on the web to answer specific questions. The technical knowledge of these end-users varies from very tech savvy to not at all.
Perhaps this is an entirely different question for a different discussion, but I would think that questions relating to sharing of data needs to consider the audience.
Hi there!
Embrapa is today recognized worldwide as reference in tropical agriculture. Knowledge produced by Embrapa is huge and needs to be more widespread, because most of it is conventionally presented as publications in scientific journals. Contents of digital information on the Internet are still restricted to the Brazilian scientific community, mainly because they are mostly presented in Portuguese language.
Use of the Web 2.0 ICTs tools by Embrapa is practically incipient and, as institutional resource for information and communication, still lacks a systematic proposal. Interoperability between various information systems that Embrapa has ever produced is also weak. Embrapa has several digital online information systems (see list below with their links), but all have no translation to other languages which hampers its use in a more global basis.
Embrapa Informática Agropecuária, located in Campinas, Brazil (www.cnptia.embrapa.br) , wants to develop solutions to these problems and is currently working on three main approaches:
Over the next few days of my participation in this forum, I can provide more detailed information on the subject.
Some Embrapa´s digital information systems:
· Agritempo http://www.agritempo.gov.br/index.php
· AgroLivre (Free Software Network for Agriculture) http://www.agrolivre.gov.br/
· AINFO http://www.ainfo.cnptia.embrapa.br/index.php/Página_principal
· BDPA http://www.bdpa.cnptia.embrapa.br/
· Embrapa Information Agency http://www.agencia.cnptia.embrapa.br/
· Infoteca-e (Information Technology in Agriculture) http://www.infoteca.cnptia.embrapa.br/
· Scientific Production Embrapa http://www.prodemb.cnptia.embrapa.br/
· Virtual Diagnosis http://diagnose2.cnptia.embrapa.br/diagnose/
Obs.: I can send more details about each of these systems in another post, if desired.
I am Peter Ballantyne from ILRI (http://www.ilri.org), based in Addis Ababa.
Nice to see the range of ideas here, and several old and new names!
Seems we are really discussing 2 questions here: 'What are we sharing' and 'what needs to be shared?' - which surely need different answers...While Johannes is already taking us into a scenario (that I like) suggesting how information and data is accessed ...
What are 'we' sharing?
At ILRI, we look to share both explicit and tacit knowledge.
TACITLY:
We are looking for ways to support and encourage our researchers to document more from their various activities (earlier in the research cycle); especailly the processes and activities that seem to happen all time time, but which are not normally shared beyond a small group. We use a lot of social media for this and concentrate around events and related milestones.
As examples, here you see materials from an internal project planning and review meeting (http://vslp.org/2011/01/31/crop-residue-tradeoffs-in-crop-livestock-systems-project-lessons-and-gaps); here from an end of project meeting (http://fodder-adoption-project.wikispaces.com/Final+Workshop); here from an ongoing multi-orgabnization project (http://nilebdc.wordpress.com/comms-tools). We try to document and make visible outputs and stories and ideas (and decisions and choices)of projects long before they go the 'final dissemination' phases.
Recognizing that events and meetings take up a huge amount of the time we have, we also try to make the design and facilitation of these more interactive, participatory and dynamic - so encouraging more sharing (see here for a recent example with partners: http://agknowledgeafrica.wikispaces.com)
We also try to encourage colleagues to use Yammer as a platform to share what they are working on, questions, challenges, etc (see very related post by Ian Thorpe about yammer at http://bit.ly/eVK4WC)
Much of this is to try and make tacit knowledge explicit ...
EXPLICITLY:
We share about the work we do; we share the outputs of the work we do
We try to capture/publish and collect and index as many outputs of ILRI work, in any format: report, video, poster, powerpoint, photo, article, book, datafile, etc. We do not just want the end of project books and articles.
We give as many as possible open creative commons licenses
We index as many as possible in our dspace repository - linking to third party sites if needed (http://mahider.ilri.org)
We publish some formats (ppt, video, photo, news, etc) on specialised social media sites (slideshare, blip.tv, flickr, wordpress, etc).
We tag all the outputs so we can aggretate and re-publish them across different sites
We use dublin core and agrovoc in ther repository
We try and list all our various web services with CIARD RING, Agrifeeds, etc
We promote various outputs across various specialised and social media sites, like Twitter
We publish all our books and reports through Google Books
We STRUGGLE to do the same for our datafiles and datasets
We try to make explict knowledge 'share-able', to increase the chances for it to travel and be re-used.
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Does all of this NEED to be shared? Not sure ... we want at least to capture and identify all that we produce, so it 'can' be shared. It needs to be at least available and accessible for others (otherwise there is little scope for sharing)...
We try and store and index and publish and lixcense everything so there are as few barriers as possible for anyone who wants to get access to what we have produced.
cheers
Peter
I come from a developing country, the Philippines, where sharing of technical information is not yet fully explored. There is a lot to capture in terms of scientific information and documentation of these is very important. We are working towards capturing the agricultural information output of agricultural scientists in the Philippines but we are moving at snail's pace. We still have to develop the culture of sharing among scientists. Many of them would rather keep information in their own institutions. Oftentimes, management and scientist response to this is rather lukewarm. Now, we are trying to make our agricultural literature available to everyone through PhilAgriNet, a national database of Philippine agricultural research. How do we develop a culture of sharing among researchers? How do we make PhilAgriNet survive?