1. Data Curation Issues and Challenges ARL/CNI Fall Forum 2008 Sayeed Choudhury sayeed@jhu.edu

2. ARL/CNI Fall Forum 2008Sayeed Choudhury Pixel data collected by telescope Sent to Fermilab for processing Beowulf Cluster produces catalog Loaded in a SQL database Data Flow (Levels of Data) Courtesy of Alex Szalay

3. ARL/CNI Fall Forum 2008Sayeed Choudhury Key Considerations Work with existing scientific systems Consider gateways for these systems as part of infrastructure development Focus on both human and technical components of infrastructure Human interoperability is more difficult than technical interoperability Trust

4. ARL/CNI Fall Forum 2008Sayeed Choudhury Questions (1) How do we transfer principles into new practices, especially given scale and complexity? What are the fundamental differences between data and collections? Human readable vs. machine readable? What about the “cloud” or the “crowd”? Can flickr help us with data curation?

5. ARL/CNI Fall Forum 2008Sayeed Choudhury Questions (2) How does a partnership audit data (and associated services) distributed across the network? Are audits about “completeness” or perhaps about transparency and reliability? Where are the existing data curators? Maybe we shouldn’t use the terms data librarian or data scientist or humanist.

6. ARL/CNI Fall Forum 2008Sayeed Choudhury Questions (3) What are the requirements? Are there common requirements, which may be most appropriate area for libraries? Are there unifying concepts or themes? “One scientist’s noise is another scientist’s signal…” What are we trying to sustain? Data? Scholarship? Our organizations?