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Group Session January 24, 2025

Data discovery: current practice, activities, state of art, and future activities

Plenary: RDA 24th Plenary Meeting – Fully Virtual

Submitted by
Uwe Schindler
Recording

Meeting objectives

Collaborative session notes:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r3oPdOEa1Nay-gieD5QVoZmzcMChFXsL/edit#heading=h.41ettwuvxbli

This is a work style session for participants to discuss and exchange each other’s activities related to data discovery and brainstorm future group activities.

Meeting presenters

DDPIG Co-chairs

Meeting agenda

  • Introduction of the group (10 minutes) (By one of co-chairs)
  • Introduction to the session (10 minutes) (By one of co-chairs)
  • Group discussion on the following questions: (65 minutes, about 20 mins per questions)
    • What are discovery challenges organisations/repositories/catalogue/researchers/etc. facing? 
    • What data discovery activities have been or are carried out at your organisation? What has worked or not? 
    • Did participants apply 10 principles to their own org/repo/catalogue. Where did they see most success?
    • What activities/topics would you like this group to carry on/discuss in 2025-2026? 
  • Wrap up (5 mins)

Target audience

  • Researchers who conduct user studies for understanding more about an individual’s data discovery process 
  • Data managers/providers who are responsible in describing data and making data findable
  • Data managers to investigate whether any user studies or evaluation method could be applied to their data repository/catalogue 
  • Attendees with some prior preparation or insights for their institutional / personal data discovery approaches would benefit more during the group discussion parts of the session.

Group Activities and Scope

The objective of this IG is to provide a forum where representatives from across the spectrum of stakeholders and roles pertaining to data discovery can work together to identify, study and make recommendations concerning issues related to improving data discovery. The goal is to produce concrete deliverables that will be recognised and valued by the research and data communities.

Additional links to informative material

Group home page

The group has delivered the following three supporting outputs: 

Slides/collaborative notes from previous plenary sessions:

Short Group Status

This group was officially endorsed at RDA P9. Since then, the group has worked on the following task forces, namely:

  1. Data/Metadata granularity (This task force spun off as a WG “data granularity WG”)
  2. Using schema.org for research dataset discovery (This task force spun off to the Research Metadata Schemas Working Group, which was endorsed in Sept. 2019, completed in 2023).
  3. Other task forces from the group:
    1. Relevancy ranking (completed)
    2. Use cases, prototyping tools and test collections (completed)
    3. Best practice for making data findable (completed)
    4. Metadata enrichment (closed)
    5. User study of data discovery context and search behaviour (in progress), which delivered the supporting output “Ten principles to improve dataset discoverability” in autumn 2024

Applicable Pathways

Data Infrastructures and Environments - Generalist
Data Lifecycles - Versioning, Provenance, Citation, and Reward

Avoid conflict with the following groups

Complex Citations Working Group
Coordinating Earth, Space, and Environmental Science Data Preservation and Scholarly Publication Pro

Please indicate at least (3) three breakout slots that would suit your meeting.

Breakout 1. Monday, 7 April, 07:00-08:30 UTC
Breakout 9. Thursday, 10 April, 07:00-08:30 UTC