Data In Context Interest Group
Chairs: Brigitte Jörg, Keith Jeffery

by Alessia Bardi -- ISTI-CNR

All slides presented in the sessions are available at https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/data-context-ig/wiki/3rd-plenary-data-context-ig-agenda.html (opens in new window).

Session 1 -- Thursday, March 27th 15:30-17:00

The co-chair Brigitte Jörg started the first session with an overview of the interest group.
The goal of the group is investigating current practices to contextualise research data and possibly define contextual data profiles that may be used in the curation lifecycle to describe the context of research datasets.
A data profile defines the metadata that must be collected to describe the object in the research domain.
Typically, a data profile puts together elements from different standard metadata schemas,
vocabularies and ontologies. The elements included in a data profile depend on the use case the profile is addressing.
A number of existing life cycle models for the management and curation of research data must be taken into
consideration, as well as the different stakeholders involved.
During the session, the following life cycle models have been presented:

• DCC
• DDI
• Data assets framework
• Jisc research lifecycle
• Tony Hey's model
• Research Object model (presented by Brian Matthews)
• Knowledge network view (presented by Wim Hugo)

In order to gather information about life cycles and use cases, a use case template was draft and it is
under completion.

The chairs also underlined the importance of collaborating with other RDA interest and working groups and introduced delegates from the related RDA groups.
Each delegate gave a brief introduction of his/her group, trying to highlight overlaps and common interest topics:

• Data Publishing Workflows, DCC Data Profiles -- Angus Whyte
• Long-tail Data IG, Data Publishing IG -- Jochen Schirrwagen
• Data description registry and interoperability WG -- Amir Aryani
• Ref Model BoF -- Yin Chen

Session 2 -- Friday, March 28th 11:00-12:30

The second session started with a summary of the previous session and continued with the speeches of delegates from related RDA groups, so as to identify re-usable use cases and approaches.
Gary Berg-Cross spoke about the groups Semantic Interoperability and Data Foundation and terminology.
Keith Jeffery spoke instead as delegate of the Metadata standards directory group. The rest of the session was dedicated to discussion.

About 25 people took part in each session.
Attendees actively participated to both sessions with questions and comments highlighting the importance of collaboration with other RDA and W3C groups.

Questions from the floor underlined the need of a more detailed explanation of the relationship
between the use case template and the data profiles.

It was argued that data profiles need to be different based on the domain and should include metadata
collected by users in addition to metadata added by data creators/curators. In order to address
both issues, the group should first perform the analysis of existing life cycles and understand how they
are implemented in different use cases.

To conclude the sessions, the co-chairs proposed to schedule another face-to-face meeting and
some phone conferences before the next plenary in order to work on the analysis of life cycles and use cases
and prepare this interest group to become a working group, where the actual implementation of
these ideas could take place.