Data Versioning Downunder: What are OUR Needs and OUR Key Actionable Recommendations for Supporting Data Infrastructures?

Dr  Jens Klump², Dr Lesley Wyborn¹, Dr Mingfang  Wu⁵, Ms Julia Martin³, Dr Donald  Hobern⁴

¹Australian National University, Acton, Australia
²Mineral Resources, CSIRO, Kensington, Australia
³ARDC, Acton, Australia
⁴ International Barcode of Life Consortium, Canberra, Australia
⁵ARDC, Clayton, Australia

Data versioning is a fundamental element of modern data management. It provides important information to enable FAIRer data, especially on data provenance to ensure identification of individuals/organisations that developed and/or funded the development of any data version from raw to evolved data products. In recognition of a lack of global best practices and guidelines, members of the International Research Data Alliance (RDA) Data Versioning Working Group (DVWG) collected 38 use cases on data versioning from a variety of organisations and domains, including 14 from Australia. From these, the DVWG formulated a set of 6 guiding principles for data versioning: 1) Revision; 2) Release; 3) Granularity; 4) Manifestation; 5) Provenance; and 6) Citation.

Since their release, it has been agreed that the application of these data versioning principles reaches further than data management, and has implications for provenance, as well as attribution, authority, and ethics of data publication and sharing.

A revised RDA Data Versioning IG is now proposing to:

1) Develop a set of actionable recommendations from the published data versioning principles;

2) Promote their adoption; and

3) Determine how they can be applied to address  increasing concerns arising on attribution, authority, and ethics arising from data republication.

This BoF will seek invited lightning presentations from several NCRIS capabilities on what their specific needs are for data versioning, followed by deeper dives in breakout sessions. The goal is to develop a better understanding of the needs of data versioning in Australian research and key actionable recommendations for supporting data infrastructures.

Biography:

Jens Klump is a geochemist by training and leads the Geoscience Analytics Team in CSIRO Mineral Resources based in Perth, Western Australia. In his work on data infrastructures, Jens covers the entire chain of digital value creation from data acquisition to data analysis with a focus on data in minerals exploration. This includes automated data and metadata capture, sensor data integration, both in the field and in the laboratory, data processing workflows, and data provenance, but also data analysis by statistical methods, machine learning and numerical modelling.