Adding value to data: eScience conference session

If you nearly had a paper ready for the International Digital Curation Conference in December (the closing date was the end of July), you may still have time to get one in to the special session "Adding value to data – Digital Repositories in the e-Science world" at the 4th IEEE International Conference on eScience, whose deadline has just been extended to 31 August. From the call for papers on the DReSNet blog:

"There is a great, untapped potential for synergies between grid/e-science technologies and a cluster of related systems addressing the management of digital assets in digital libraries and repositories. The digital material generated from and used by academic and other research is to an increasing extent being held in formal data management systems; these systems are variously categorized as digital repositories, libraries or archives, although the distinction between them relates more to the sort of data that they contain and the use to which the data is put, rather than to any major difference in functionality. In many cases, these systems are used currently to hold relatively simple objects, for example an institution’s pre-prints and publications, or e-theses. However, some institutions are beginning to use them to manage research data in a variety of disciplines, including physical sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities, as well as the output from various digitisation programmes."

This does look very interesting. They suggest several research challenges, which I think tie in pretty much with our own agenda, although the last is novel to me in the way it's framed:

• Digital preservation and curation in research infrastructures
• Interoperability
• Security
• Provenance
• Metadata Extraction
• Workflow Integration
• Architecture of Participation

There's a good programme committee, so the session could be extremely useful. Go to their entry for the submission details...