Agricultural Data Interest Group (IGAD) Pre-Meeting Agenda Research Data Alliance 21st to 22nd September 2015 INRA, Paris (France)

1. Data management planning
Means, goals, and cultures
Hugo Besemer
Library Wageningen UR

2. Data management and
Wageningen
 Data management planning course for PhD candidates
since 2012
 Data management plans mandatory for PhD projects and
research groups since April 2014
 Policy supported by
● “Support hub” for all questions
● Facilities for data publishing
● Code repository
Still working on
• Storage
“archiving”
• Electronic
laboratory
notebooks
• Guidelines
for
ownership

3. Institutional data management
planning
 Who benefits?
● Policy makers: there is a policy
● PhD researchers are empowered to get answers
from their supervisors
● Research groups can sort out procedures and learn
across groups
 What is needed
● People’s and organizational dynamics (that’s
different everywhere)
● Develop a common language!

4. Two cultures
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people
who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought
highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been
expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or
twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how
many of them could describe the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.
Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of:
Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”
C. P. Snow, 1959 Rede Lecture entitled "The Two Cultures and
the Scientific Revolution".

5. Two cultures: Time is moving on
 Lord Snow
● Literary intellectuals
● Natural scientists
 Many aginfo meetings
● Knowledge managers
● Techies
 What I am experiencing now
● Infrastructure builders
● Empirical scientists
Bemoaning a glorious past
Promises of a brave new world
Promises of a brave new world
Pressed for funding

6. Different meanings: Data
 Infrastructure builders
● Data is the evidence that supports a truth claim. It
can be copied to different physical locations, be
reformatted - and even be “triplified” or
“SKOSified” :=) - and remain itself
 Empirical scientists
● Data resides somewhere and comes in a specific
“physical” format.

7. Beyond data: Metadata
 Infrastructure builders
● Data about data, to identify or to describe the data
and its context
 Empirical scientists
● Anything goes: templates, parameters used, data
models, laboratory notes, annotations

8. Data management roles
 Infrastructure builders:
● Scientists sit on their data and should be convinced
to deposit it in a repository with an open licence
 Empirical scientists
● Data is often produced in chains under informal
agreements

9. Data documentation
 Infrastructure builders
● Documenting a static dataset at project, file and
parameter level
 Empirical scientists
● May include laboratory notes etc. during research
● Parameters / variables are an issue!

10. Storage, archiving
and data publishing
 Infrastructure builders
● Fluid terminology
 Empirical scientists
● Storage is for daily use during research
● Archiving can be for data that you may want to use
at a later stage (e.g. year 1 when you are in year
3) – so no daily backup or fast access required
● People like “data publishing” for datasets deposited
in repositories

11. Legal issues
 Infrastructure builders
● Open licenses for data re-use
 Empirical scientists
● Agreements between actors in the data chain
(students – researchers – supervisors – external
parties)
● Interested in open licenses, also as consumers

12. What about IGAD?
Messages for the discussion on institutional issues
 If we want to address institutional issues we need to be
aware of different cultures and languages
 I did not mention anything specifically agricultural
● but that does not imply that there are no specific
institutional issues
 For us things started with learning and training
activities…..

13. Thanks
http://www.slideshare
.net/HugoBesemer