Data Discovery IG RDA 8th Plenary meeting

Kickoff Event for the Interest Group on Data Discovery

An emerging statement on research data is that it should be FAIR: “Findable, Accessible, Interpretable and Reusable”. To comply with the first of these criteria, being Findable, we need a data infrastructure that supports users in discovering research data regardless of its location or the manner in which it is stored, described and exposed. This is a significant and growing challenge, as the number of research data repositories, and the need for cross-disciplinary data discovery, increases. This interest group aims to explore common elements and shared issues that those who search for data, and who build systems that enable data search, share.

Case statement: Draft charter is at https://rd-alliance.org/groups/new-paradigms-data-discovery-ig

Meeting objectives

The objectives of this group are to provide a forum where representatives from across the spectrum of stakeholders and roles pertaining to data search can discuss issues related to improving data discovery. The goal is to identify concrete deliverables such as a registry of data search engines, common test datasets, usage metrics, and a collection of data search use cases and competency questions.
The objectives of this meeting is to plan the scope of activities of this nascent IG, and come up with an action plan for the deliverables and timeline for these activities. Potential activities could include writing a white paper on issues, challenges and suggestions to move forward,regarding data discovery: the development of a set of metrics to measure data discovery quality, and the organisation of a 'data search bake-off' to compare different data search engines.

Meeting agenda:

The workshop consists of 3 parts, of 30 minutes each:

11:30- 12:00: Setting the stage: three  key components of discovery technology:
·      Content enrichment and faceted search - Ilya Zaslavsky, San Diego Supercomputer Center
·      Relevance ranking – Jeff Grethe, Biocaddie/UCSD
·      User Characterisation and Search Personalisation - Siri Jodha Singh Khalsa, NSIDC

12:00 – 12:15: Discuss topics for breakout groups. Some thoughts from previous meetings include:
·      Common API’s for data discovery (e.g. Open Search? OAI-PMH?): inventory and comparison
·      Benchmarking search results for data discovery
·      Overlap and interactions with other IG/WGs

12:15 - 12:45: Discussion in breakout groups & brief report back.

12:45 – 13:00: Next steps: frequency and mode of meetings; steps to get to definitions of WGs, etc, 

Audience: All those interested in data search, including developers, directors, curators and others involved with research data discovery and data metrics.

Group chair serving as contact person Anita de Waard (Elsevier)/Siri Jodha Khalsa (NSIDC)