Versioning Data Is About More than Revisions: A Conceptual Framework and Proposed Principles

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This 1-hour webinar will address the issue of a lack of a consistent framework and agreed definitions of best practices across data communities in guiding the management of data versioning,  including the citation and identification of different versions of a data set. The talk will introduce six foundational principles for versioning of datasets: Revision, Release, Granularity, Manifestation, Provenance and Citation which were derived from the collection and analysis of 39 use cases and current practices of data versioning across 33 organisations, and used the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as a conceptual framework. The six principles provide a high-level framework for researchers in guiding a consistent practice of data versioning and can also serve as guidance for data centres or data providers when setting up their own data revision and version protocols and procedures, as well as systematic identification of their data products. 

The presented work was developed by the RDA Data Versioning Work Group. In this talk, we will also discuss post-WG activities including starting an RDA Data Versioning  Interest Group, to develop a set of recommendations arising from the data versioning principles, promote their adoption, and analyze how they can be applied to questions of attribution,  authority,  and ethics arising from publication and sharing of multiple versions of a source dataset.

Jens Klump, CSIRO Mineral Resources, Principal Research Scientist Earth Science Informatics and Co-chair of the RDA Data Versioning WG

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