Speaker
Mark Parsons
(Research Data Alliance)
Description
In recent years governments and research institutions have emphasized the need for open data as a fundamental component of open science. But we need much more than the data themselves for them to be reusable and useful. We need descriptive and machine-readable metadata, of course, but we also need the software and the algorithms necessary to fully understand the data. We need the standards and protocols that allow us to easily read and analyze the data with the tools of our choice. We need to be able to trust the source and derivation of the data. In short, we need an interoperable data infrastructure, but it must be a flexible infrastructure able to work across myriad cultures, scales, and technologies. This talk will present a concept of infrastructure as a body of human, organisational, and machine relationships built around data. It will illustrate how a new organization, the Research Data Alliance, is working to build those relationships to enable functional data sharing and reuse.
