Featured Speakers 2011

Jan Brase
Managing Agent, DataCite

Jan Brase has a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Computer science. His research background is metadata, ontologies and digital libraries. Since 2005 he has been head of the DOI-registration agency for research data at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). He is also Managing Agent of DateCite, an international consortium with 15 members from 11 countries (www.datacite.org). DataCite was founded in December 2009 with the goal of making the online access to research data for scientists easier by promoting the acceptance of research data as individual, citable scientific objects.

Jan is Chair of the International DOI foundation (IDF), Vice-Chair of the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) and Co-Chair of the recently established CODATA Data Citation task group. He is author of several articles and conference paper on the citation of data sets and the new challenges for libraries in dealing with such non-textual information objects.

Peter Fox
Tetherless World Constellation Chair

Peter Fox is a Tetherless World Constellation Chair and Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Previously, he was Chief Computational Scientist at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Fox has a B.Sc. (hons) and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (including physics and computer science) from Monash Univsersity. His research covers the fields of solar and solar-terrestrial physics, ocean and environmental informatics, computational and computer science, and distributed semantic data frameworks. The results are applied to large-scale distributed scientific repositories addressing the full life-cycle of data and information within specific science and engineering disciplines as well as among disciplines. Fox is chair of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics Union Commission on Data and Information and past chair of the AGU Special Focus Group on Earth and Space Science Informatics, is an associate editor for the Earth Science Informatics journal, is a member of the editorial board for Computers in Geosciences. Fox serves on the International Council for Science’s Strategic Coordinating Committee for Information and Data.

Professor Bryan Heidorn
Director, School of Information Resources and Library Science, University of Arizona
President, JRS Biodiversity Foundation

Repository as App: Functionality to attract Dark Data
Small research projects greatly outnumber large-scale projects and together represent big data; yet small projects rarely have dedicated data curation staff. This has led to dark data. Dark data is not easily discovered and rarely preserved. The data across these myriad small projects appears heterogeneous, making standard metadata creation and other curation practices difficult.  The solution is not to create one-size fits-all data repositories but to group similar research practices and develop research integrated value added tools. If institutional and disciplinary repositories are to serve these projects, the repositories must provide services relevant to the daily research process. They must facilitate data acquisition, analysis, visualization, preservation and dissemination. Analysis of actual data management practices, of medium to small projects, are examined to identify not why they do not use repositories but why they apparently use less than optimal tools for curation such as spreadsheets and notepads. To make maximum use of research data we must create a service industry that makes the life of researchers easier and more productive. Biodiversity research practice with its strong researcher independence and interdisciplinarity is a prime example.

P. Bryan Heidorn holds a degree in biology, and a PhD in Information Science. He was an owner of a software company specializing in chemical tracking and environmental monitoring. He was an associate professor for 12 years at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science and served two years as a program manager in the National Science Foundation Division of Biological Infrastructure where he served in several programs including Advances in Biological Informatics, Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation and the Data Working Group. He is now Director of the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona and the president of the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. His research areas include biodiversity informatics, data curation, natural language processing and machine learning.

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