Five suggestions for Open Science evangelists

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“This week I attended the @boraz lecture at UNC-Charlotte, and the debate-topic of Open Science was in the air... First off, while I’m hardly even a citizen-scientist – my goal here is to offer, as best I can, a software-industry perspective on the important mission of Open Science... Below I’ve outlined a group of interrelated ideas to help drive Open Science, that are drawn from my experience working on various Internet and IT projects... [1] Place = KNOWN... Open Science needs one place, or one standard for, raw-data... [2] Container = SIMPLE... The standard container for Open Science data should be as simple as a single blog post... So what is it about raw data, like observation-notes, or data-threads produced by instrumentation that is so hard to pack-n-store? For 90-something percent of the data sets, even RSS would likely work just fine. Thus, my suggestion here is to just vote-and-go with some raw container format, while keeping in mind my next point about instrumentation... [3] Default = ON... Most people don’t turn off, what is already turned on... I figure most modern science devices are IP based, can connect to the web, and likely have the ability to “push” data “somewhere”... To drive Open Science, how about this device configuration model: The publish point should be: Place=KNOWN (agreement on the repository), Pack the data into a core universal format: Container=SIMPLE (stop sweating the small stuff first), Then setup instruments to Default=ON (make it a step harder to NOT publish)...[4] App = OS-INSTALLED... Every smartphone has a calculator, and could just as easily be an instrument for raw-data. What if, in a science-logging world every smartphone was an instrument (it is)? And every device came with a “calculator-grade” app to turn on and publish raw data to a known repository? ... Someone at the OS level needs to take note and fold instrument-to-raw-data capabilities into the various devices available to consumers. Clearly instrumentation is not a marketplace differentiator on Carrier and OS-team roadmaps, but in a slightly-more-perfect world, I would hope the Sci-Geeks and the Phone-Mates could actually collaborate on instruments and repository features... [5] Announcement = RAW-LOG-bub:What are you raw-publishing now? So lets pull all this together. The iPhones and the instruments collect data; the format is RSS/XML-Raw ish; the repository is Archive.org / Apache / Wikipedia.org ish, and default=ON (hopefully) turns the Open Data stream into 10x the Twitter fire hose (Moores Law for instrument data anybody?)... How about we make all this data discoverable via an announcement system – a “just the facts kid” approach to announcing these data sets? How about a custom Tweet-style platform for Open Science Data? Yes, Twitter can serve that purpose, but as the pro-catalogers get engaged; as the meta about raw-science-data grows, the data model of Twitter easily under-serves the Open Science mission...”

Link:

http://robertreddick.com/2012/02/26/put-openscience-on-autopilot/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.comment oa.open_science oa.events oa.metadata oa.standards oa.twitter oa.tools oa.wikipedia oa.rss oa.repositories.data oa.repositories

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:49

Date published:

02/27/2012, 11:30