Ariadne Issue 69 has been published recently with its usual mix of features both technical and more wide-ranging together with event reports and a raft of reviews on recent publications. This issue includes a contribution from Alex Ball entitled The Second British Library DataCite Workshop in which Alex gives an account of the contributions to the Workshop. They include an overview of data citation and discovery where reference to the OAIS Information Model served to explain the different metadata requirements for the tasks of citation, discovery and reuse; an explanation of how the DataCite Metadata Schema had been developed, from its conception in August 2009, to the release of version 2.2 in July 2011; an account of how BL took up a major recommendation of a study of the research data landscape which was that the BL should consider providing a data discovery service; as well as a description of the development of the NERC Data Catalogue Service (DCS); and an introduction to RDF and the advanced applications to which it may be put.
Marieke Guy provides a report of the recent Eduserv Symposium where the theme this year was what exactly were the implications of big data for those working in research, learning, and operations in the Higher Education sector? In Eduserv Symposium 2012: Big Data, Big Deal? Marieke’s account begins with a discussion of the nature of the delegates to the event and the issues they regarded as important. The Symposium’s sessions included a comprehensive overview of the big data landscape followed by insights into the world of genome data from the Sanger Institute and its efforts in ‘weathering the data deluge’, the importance of knowledge engineering in bridging the gap between research and healthcare, and a real-world example involving the amount of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Marieke details the conclusions offered at the close of the Symposium in response to how we can approach the challenge of big data, some of which may be surprising.
Further information on Issue 69 is available in a news feature on the UKOLN Web site.