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Keynote Abstracts |
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Behavioral and Social Science Data Data Policy
List
of Participants About the CODATA 2002 Conference
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1.
Preserving and Archiving S&T Data
Trends In Archiving
Digital Data The scientific and technical
worlds have been creating and collecting information in digital
form for well over 40 years, and it is arguable that they were the
first to recognise the necessity of sound infrastructures to preserve
that data for future reuse, examination and criticism. But it is
also true that efforts were fragmented and often discipline-specific.
Digital preservation is now of concern to many; it is the cultural
heritage communities, business, and governments who are setting
the agenda and scoping the problem. The issues are many - who pays
to keep material whose value may not be realised for many years?
How do we decide what to retain if we cannot keep it all ? How do
we ensure we know enough about what we have preserved to enable
its future use, particularly in a discipline and possibly a culture
far removed from its creators ? The scientific and technical communities
have solutions to offer in these areas, but they can also learn
from acitivities elsewhere. I will draw on experiences in business,
scientific and cultural worlds to illustrate shared problems and
possible shared solutions to these and other challenges.
2.
Legal Issues in the use of S&T Data Preserving
the Positive Functions of the Public Domain in Science Science
has greatly benefited by the absence of intellectual property rights
in data and in scientific methodologies. In recent years,
intellectual property has played a greater role in scientific work.
While intellectual property rights may well have a positive role
to play in some fields of science, so does the public domain.
This talk will discuss ongoing work exploring the positive functions
of the public domain. This work may help scientists and lawyers
achieve a better understanding of the circumstances under which
intellectual property rights will foster science and those under
which preserving the public domain will be more effective in fostering
science.
3.
Interoperability and Data Integration Informatics - the acquisition,
management, and assessment of large (huge) amounts of data - has
permeated biology. GenBank contains billions of base pairs of DNA
and complete genomic sequences are readily available. Microbial
genomes are sequenced in a matter of days. Expression-array techniques
allow the dissection of molecular function at the genomic level,
while some in the biodiversity community now aspire to a global
all-taxa inventory. Once, dreamers thought about assembling all
of the sequence information necessary to document an entire genome.
Now it is possible to imagine bringing together all of the information
necessary to describe the biosphere - past and present. But is it
possible? How vast is the challenge? Are the difficulties technical,
or sociological, or semantic, or ... Most importantly of all, what
could we do with all of this information? Would it - in totality
- be useful in any meaningful sense? Can there ever be a biological
database of everything? 4.
Information Economics for S&T Data Economics of information
services for scientific and technical data in the Applications of information technology continue to spread throughout the academic and business worlds. The internet was developed and utilized originally within academia where scientists and technologists enjoyed the free exchange of scientific information with their peers. As business and entertainment uses of the web grew, approaches for controlling or restricting the flow of information more responsive to the economic needs of the business community developed. Yet the needs of the scientific community for continued easy and free exchange of information remain. This talk reviews information technology, government policy, legislation and business model issues surrounding the flow of academic information in the context of economic theories for information goods. The speaker presents an overall view of the problems based on his long experience in developing and managing database and electronic library systems at the National Institute of Informatics in Japan (formally NACSIS), a national center for scientific information. The lecture concludes with a recommended scheme for cooperative, effective usable data flows among scientists and technologists across the world.
5. Emerging Tools and Techniques for Data Handling Text
Mining - the Technology To Convert Text into Knowledge? In this presentation we will look at Text Mining, also known as Information Extraction: the technological solution that addresses the problem of mapping technical texts into fixed-format representations, such as database records or frames. We will define the task using real-life examples. We will take a bird’s eye view of the basic text mining architecture, and discuss components of the text mining systems. We will look at the existing tools and solution providers and will discuss the limits of the technology. The talk will be illustrated with author’s experience in the development of a text mining tool in genomics.
6.
Ethics in the use of S&T Data Science has been moving
ahead at an ever increasing rapid pace. To encourage innovation
and investment, there has been increasing stress on the protection
of intellectual property. The international legal system relating
to patents now covers a significant part of production in diverse
fields and efforts exist to extend intellectual property principles
to cover all types of services, traditional knowledge and scientific
and technical data in the form of data bases. Questions have been
raised for some time now on what the underlying principles should
be that would govern intellectual property in the area of scientific
and technical data. This talk addresses the interplay between legal
and economic aspects on the one hand and moral and ethical aspects
on the other, particularly from the viewpoint of the advancement
of science itself, which is so fundamental for progress across the
total spectrum of human endeavour. Issues concerning data access
by the poor and by developing countries will also be addressed along
with examples illustrating the direction we need to go. Ultimately,
overall human good has to be the deciding factor.
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Last site update: 15 March 2003
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