Author Archives: Steve Walsh

INSPIRE and Universities: An update thanks to James Reid

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After some fantastic help from James Reid at EDINA we thought to put together a blog post summarising some of the conclusions we have come to over INSPIRE.

At this stage it may be  worth having a look at my earlier but less informed post regarding INSPIRE to understand how my understanding of the issues has progressed.

For INSPIRE to be something that universities need to spend time and money complying with, then there are several questions needing an answer. We are not in a position to answer all of them with 100% certainty but with the help of James here are some conclusions we have come to.

1. Are universities  “public bodies” or more accurately public authorities? This appears to be one area that the fog has lifted from. The INSPIRE Regulations will only apply to public authorities and James has taken the trouble to check out this area with Edinburgh  and is certain that universities are public authorities for the purposes of INSPIRE.  So one “Yes” to INSPIRE

2. Do universities hold and control datasets that match the data described in any of the INSPIRE data Annexes? After looking through the datasets collected for the IBIBS project I have found 11 (or about 5% of them) that match up with some of the data themes in Annex iii. The IGIBS data is probably not  representative  of the total extent of data held by Aberystwyth University and a data inventory of data held by some of  the academic staff would be needed to quantify the amount of INSPIRE data held.  So another “Yes” to INSPIRE

3. What is the public task of a university?  Here is where the situation becomes less clear.  There appears to be no public task defined for universities. The problem seems to stem from the fact the universities are not covered by the PSI Regulations and therefore have not needed to define a public task for themselves.  Again James has made some progress on this and pointed to a publication from the National Archives that helps explain the process 0f defining a body’s public task.  There has also been some slightly ambiguous advice from the Scottish Information Commissioner that includes a suggestion that it may be relevant for a university to seek legal advice over the  issue. So there seems to be no clear answer to this question. A case of  “we dont know yet”

4. Do those data identified in 2 above relate to the public task of the university? Again until we know the answer to 3 above  we can only guess at the answer to this question. Commonsense suggests that research and teaching must be part of the task if it is ever defined. So my guess would be a “probable Yes”

5. Will there be any attempt to enforce the regulations? Again no way of knowing the answer to this and it may even involve some judicial intervention to clarify the situation. Strictly speaking if Universities are public authorities for the purposes of the INSPIRE Regulations then they are already not complying with INSPIRE as they have not established a complaints procedure to deal with questions over INSPIRE data provision as required by the Regulations. So currently a “NO” but with the uncertainty surrounding public task it could be a complicated or impossible job to enforce this regulation at present. So this will have to be a wait and see area.

Map Library becomes digital……

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Last week at IGES we had a rebirth of the map library as it became digital. This probably sounds more dramatic than it was.  What we did was to create a new drive on the public network for IGES staff and students   with a structured directory and put on some spatial data that relates to the Dyfi Biosphere. We also  highlighted  a few Web Map Services that you can access and invited some staff along to talk about using the area and how to create metadata through Geodoc.  There is also an  open invitation to staff and students to store any spatial data they want to make available to others on the drive as long as they also give it a metadata file to keep it company.

Really none of that had to happen in the map library but I think that the physical space it provides is more important than you might think. Now we have a place that encourages access to data  and metadata creation. This together with a map librarian who will help people through the use of the resources like Geodoc, makes it a place for spatial data management and access. The walls have posters espousing data sources, Gogeo and metadata creation and IGES has taken a step towards changing its culture of data management.

I like to think of the map library as a locus of good practice that will spread  the message of spatial data management.

DCC Roadshow Oxford

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Below is a copy of a blog entry I put on the DCC website after attending their Roadshow in September ……

 

As a rather out-of-practice ecologist I was looking forward to the DCC Roadshow with a little trepidation. Would the material be aimed at digital curators writing code to fine tune their repository functionality?  Or would it be of help to someone like me… drafted in from a different area to work for a few months trying to get to grips with the management and sharing of spatial data for the JISC funded IGIBS project.

Well, all concerns were rapidly dispelled as the first day got underway and the programme was delivered with a broad church in mind.  We were accommodated in the rather glorious Wadham college and I began to feel like a well-cared for data object. Securely stored in safe surroundings and my metadata had obviously been carefully read as I was now being professionally transformed into a more up-to-date format just  before my existing file type became redundant.

It  was clear that Oxford had taken data management  seriously and was a centre for developing new ideas and services to aid their researchers and the wider community. Particularly inspiring was a presentation from David Shotton, who had taken his position as Director of the Bioinformatics Research Group to add considerable professional  weight to the importance of developing a professional  data management  infrastructure. He was leading a project to  manage, publish and cite datasets. Using the theme of infectious diseases was the icing on the cake for me. The freeing of data on this subject is providing both an “academic good� and a very obvious “public good�, especially to countries with less ability to access the journals and data than more developed regions  with perversely  less public need for the data.

Themes that came out of the day were the importance of standards in metadata to bridge across disciplines and the need for institutional repositories to hold  the “long tail� data that most researchers produce en route to paper publication.  It wasn’t until later that evening , when I found myself not in the pub but spending an hour watching Bryan Heidorn on YouTube presenting a version of his “Curating the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science� paper,  that I realised how the day had really got my remaining grey cells up and firing.

Day two comprised mainly of  group work where I began to understand the roles and problems facing many of the different data managers attending the Roadshow. The need for researchers to fully engage with the data management service providers became apparent as the group sessions developed. There are whole armies (well maybe platoons) of professional data experts trying to herd the cat like academic data producers into the pen of good practice. From meeting the Roadshow participants and coming to understand their roles and expertise,  it is hard to understand how there could be a problem with data management.  It was not  until I came back to Aberystwyth’s IGES department and saw individuals trying to finish off theses, and papers as well as prepare for the new academic term that I really understood the problem. As was suggested in day one of the event, it is only the moment when data management arrives at  the top of an individual’s priority list that it actually gets done. I have since been thinking about trying to start a project using “Nudge� theory to try and move data management up the priority tree in an academic department.

Day three was focused on the tools available to aid the  researcher in their data management . The DCC data management planning tool shone out as a valuable asset for  meeting the increasing need of funding bids to meet the demands/requests of the funding councils.  For me it will provide the framework on which to hang my thoughts and conclusions about managing  spatial data and  provides some of the structure for my work on the IGIBS project.

Now back at Aberystwyth and slipping back into my routine, the measure of success, at least from my perspective, for the Roadshow will be both the new sections in my  final report that I feel able to write and  the changes in working practices that come  about as a result of  my attendance.  Well it’s too early to say, but as I have just  moved metadata creation for some  soon to be used images and shape files to the top of my priority tree, maybe the digital curation  my brain received from the DCC is beginning to show.

 

 

Meeting with EDINA and DCC staff in Edinburgh

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I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with some people from EDINA and the DCC in Edinburgh on Wednesday. The aim of the meeting was to get some input and advice from some experts on the ideas I have for a spatial data management best practice report.  So a big  thank you to Martin Donnelly of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), James Reid, Stuart McDonald, Chris Higgins and Michael Koutroumpas from EDINA.

I had a long 7 hour train journey from Aberystwyth so my apologies for the overdose of PowerPoint slides that I had time to create before the meeting. It was extremely helpful to talk to experienced and knowledgeable  people about the direction the report, which is one of our outputs from the IGIBS project. My background in environmental science leaves a few significant gaps in my knowledge and, as Chris put it, “a sanity check” on my work was well worth the time needed to attend the meeting. I even had the opportunity for an evening walk on Arthur’s Seat and a lunch hour looking around Edinburgh as a bonus.

Some of the key advice from the meeting centered around the following; INSPIRE and how it will or wont impact on Universities,  insights into the not so obvious but very significant benefits of writing a data management plan and where it fits into good data management, some great pointers to other studies and sources of information that will feed into the report, the need to make the report easily accessible to its audience and some great institutional  case study examples from Australian through Californian to British Universities.

Another theme that emerged from the discussion was how INSPIRE and the need for good data management can be viewed as a threat but it is also a great opportunity for academic staff to gain easier access to the ever increasing amounts of spatial data being created around the Globe. A viewpoint that will help to make the report more appealing to time starved researchers.

We also had talk of semantics and just what do you call a spatial data infrastructure (if you don’t want to use SDI). It was suggested that UK Location has moved towards Location Information Infrastructure as a way of making an SDI label more intelligible to the uninitiated. I found this much more enlightening and useful that the recent update from UK Location on “Data Things” and abstracted “Data Objects”  but a few hours of digestion may make this a little more understandable to my irretrievably ecologically orientated mind.  It reminded me of some reading I had done about old Norse governance and how their aassembly was called the “Thing” and met in the “Thingstead”.  I remember thinking that they didn’t have a proper word for it so just called it the “Thing” but I guess that just shows how language develops over time and maybe we can look back to SDI in a few years with the benefit of a really useful label for it, whatever that may be.

As a result of the meeting I am re writing some sections I had drafted and adding some new summary sheets for subsections of the intended audience and more importantly I don’t feel like my original thinking was miles off the mark, just a bit  under-informed and lacking some focus.  So creating the rest of the report will also be made a little easier once I have digested the new material I have been pointed towards.

So thank you once more gentlemen and I look forward to meeting you again if the occasion arises.

Steve