This file is a contribution to the 12th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC17) taking place in Edinburgh on 20 - 23 February 2017, and specifically its Workshop 1, "A postcard from the future: tools and services from a perfect DMP world" (DMP stands for Data Management Plan).
The workshop organisers have asked participants for various input beforehand, including responses to the following three questions:
- Why are you motivated / excited / required to work on data management / DMPs?
- I am interested in integrating research workflows with the Web to facilitate collaboration amongst and between humans and machines. Data form a key component of such workflows, and data management plans can assist in handling research data all along their life cycle.
- What are your pain points?
- DMPs are often treated as yet another bureaucratic layer in the research ecosystem, while their potential to actually make research more efficient through better data management remains largely untapped.
- DMPs are usually neither machine actionable nor properly versioned nor public. In contrast, in ever more contexts of our lives, it is becoming routine to have almost instant and occasionally even user-friendly access to information about things of interest. Take trains, for example: in many areas, the course of railways and the location of train stations along the way can easily be looked up using various means, and the same goes for time tables and itineraries as well as for delays or detours. Basically any person or machine can look that up for any train, be they on a train or not. Now replace the trains by research objects like data: their whereabouts are typically only known to their train's driver and not, e.g., to the stations or to drivers of other trains, at least not until months or years have gone by. I see machine actionable, versioned and public DMPs as a way to move research closer to the transport scenario and beyond.
- I am not aware of anyone having tested the extent to which aggregation of multiple DMPs or parts thereof could provide new opportunities to discover and engage with the underlying data, including at scale.
- What do you hope to get out of this workshop?
- Getting a better overview of what others are doing in this space.
- Ideas for next steps in terms of assessing the usefulness of DMPs that are any, neither or all of machine actionable, versioned and public.