Open data is a concept I came across while attending the 2nd International Digital Curation Conference and felt it deserved a post in its own right, rather than subsumed by the conference report. I am an advocate of Open Access and feel that Open Data must be a part of this process. What is the point of being able to freely read the publication if you cant freely access the data the publication refers to?
The concept of Open Data was presented to me by Peter Murray-Rust, via the DCC conference, who regularly blogs about the subject. There is a Wikipedia entry which defines the concept and a mailing list which promotes discussion of Open Data.
Steps are underway in the bio-science domain to define Minimum reporting requirements of data for repositories and publications. Two prominent examples are the MGED community with MIAME and the Proteomics community with MAIPE. Within these noble efforts there is no mention of Open Data although it seems the next logical step in the data curation pipeline;
- record the defined minimum information and metadata.
- structure and present the data.
- allow access of the data
Maybe when the effort is made to properly record, structure and describe the data, as these minimum reporting requirements advocate, the scientist and journals will be only too happy to take the next step and declare it Open Data, for the sake of scientific knowledge and progression.
fgibson.com 