Murray-Rust on Digital Curation Conference day 2

Peter Murray-Rust has written two blog posts (here and here; I'm not sure if those are permanent URL's...) about day 2 of the International Digital Curation Conference in Washington DC. Thanks, Peter.

In the first post, he began:

"There is a definitely an air of optimism in the conference - we know the tasks are hard and very very diverse but it’s clear that many of them are understood."

He then picked up on Carole Goble's presentation on workflows. Here are a few random extracts from Peter's random jottings (his description):

"The great thing about Carole is she’s honest. Workflows are HARD. They are expensive. There are lots of them. Not of them does exactly what you want. And so on. [PMR: We did a lot of work - by our standards - on Taverna but found it wasn’t cost-effective at that stage. Currently we script things and use Java. Someday we shall return.]"

"myExperiment.org. A collaborative site for workflows. You can go there and find what you want (maybe) and find people to talk to. “- bazaar for workflows, encapsulated objects (EMO) single WFs or collections, chemistry data with blogged log book, encapsulatd experimental objects Open Linked Data linked initiative…"

"Scientists do not collaborate - scientists would rather share a toothbrush [...] than gene names (Mike Ashburner)
who gets the credit? - who is allowed to update?. Changing metadata rather than data. Versioning. Have to get credit and reputation managed. Scientitsts are driven by money, fame, reputation, fear of being left behind"

"Annotations are first class citizens"

His second post covers Jane Hunter and Kwok Cheung's presentation on compound document objects (CDOs):

"Increasing pressure to share and publish data while maintaining competitiveness.
Main problem lack of simple tools for recording, publishing, standards.
What is the incentive to curate and deposit? What granularity? concern for IP and ownership"

"Current problems with traditional systems - little semantic relationship, little provenance, little selectivity, interactivity , flexibility and often fixed rendering and interfaces. No multilevel access. either all open or all restricted
usually hardwired presentation"

"Capture scientific provenance through RDF (and can capture events in physical and digital domain)
Compound Digital Objects - variable semantics, media, etc.
Typed relationships within the CDOs. (this is critical)"

"SCOPE [the tool Jane & Kwok have developed is] a simplified tool for authoring these objects. Can create provenance graphs. Infer types as much as possible. RSS notification. Comes with a graphical provenance explorer."

Thanks again, Peter!