Many research datasets generated within the physical sciences arise from diverse experimental and computational methods, often in small laboratories and as a result of the efforts of individual researchers. The experimental protocols adopted will often be novel and standard community practices for data representation and description will be limited.
The aim of this session will be to share practices and approaches from across the community that could help achieve more effective curation of datasets in areas of the physical sciences where standards are lacking. We will focus in particular on the need to ensure that data are sufficiently documented and described to enable effective reuse within and across domains.
We will engage a range of initiatives, organisations and individuals with experiences and challenges to share relating to data curation. These will include, among others, national data infrastructure initiatives, data curation networks, disciplinary data repositories, and practicing data stewards. We are additionally engaging with the Research Tools and Data Curation Workflow Interest Group and the Chemistry Research Data Interest Group.
We will explore questions around responsibilities for data curation, the tools and infrastructure needed to enable this and how policies and guidelines can influence practices. For example: What is it reasonable to expect of individual researchers? How can institutions and infrastructure providers help? How can general data stewardship expertise be best channeled into domain-specific data curation activities?
Ultimately we hope to identify and classify common data curation challenges encountered by members of the RDA community active in the Physical Sciences with a view to identifying whether there is a need and opportunity to cultivate collaborative activities that will lead to more effective data interoperability and reuse.
