III-CXT: Promoting the curation of research data through library-laboratory collaboration

Cornell Univ - State: Awds Made Prior May 2010, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed project will apply some of the general principles of archiving and curation to digital data, with a focus on scientific data. The proposal calls for the development and refinement of a "staging process" that will bring an appropriate mix of human skills and automated tools to organize and initially describe a given corpus prior to incorporation into a repository. It assumes that for the foreseeable future some level of human judgement will be needed to adequately prepare and package a raw body of data. Outstanding questions to be addressed include whether a some point the level of human effort so high as to preclude further scaling. The proposed activity consists of two main parts: the design and deployment of a digital staging repository and the design and deployment of a metadata management architecture. The first encompasses issues of institutional policy, requirements analysis, and the selection and integration of existing software platforms (e.g., Fedora). The second will deal with complex metadata issues such as web semantics, ontology creation, and inter-domain cross-walking.