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Re: Report on CODATA 2008 Conference

  • To: epc@iucr.org
  • Subject: Re: Report on CODATA 2008 Conference
  • From: Lachlan Cranswick <lachlanc@magma.ca>
  • Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:31:34 -0400

Hi Brian,  (Cc epc)

Very interesting report.  Is there any chance some/most of it could be submitted
to the IUCr newsletter?

Lachlan

At 04:05 PM 10/14/2008 +0100, you wrote:
>To members of the Electronic Publishing and Database Committees
>(copy to IUCr staff for information)
>
>Herewith my digest of the highlights of the recent CODATA meeting in
>Kyiv.
>
>Brian
>_________________________________________________________________________
>Brian McMahon                                       tel: +44 1244 342878
>Research and Development Officer                    fax: +44 1244 314888
>International Union of Crystallography            e-mail:  bm@iucr.org
>5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England
>
>==============================================================================
>
>Scientific information for society - from today to the future
>-------------------------------------------------------------
>
>CODATA 2008 - Kyiv, Ukraine, 5-8 October 2008
>
>The theme of the 21st International CODATA Conference continued the
>emphasis on the information society that has emerged in the last few
>biennial meetings. But if the last conference in Beijing focused on
>the maturity of CODATA after 40 years of promoting and representing
>international data science, the 2008 meeting took as its keynote the
>importance of engaging the younger generation of scientists to lead
>future developments in a world community increasingly dependent upon
>information and scientific data.
>
>Plenary lectures
>----------------
>
>A sombre assessment of the problems that need to be tackled was
>provided in the plenary lecture of Bohdan Hawrylyshyn ("Information
>and knowlegde as a tool in facing global challenges"); put bluntly,
>his thesis was "the world is sick in its main components". Focusing in
>turn on the primary areas of demography, ecology, economy, geopolitics
>and the failure of the institutions of society (schools, churches,
>even family), he provided a reasoned but unsettling picture of the
>state of the modern world. But the advantage of a rational analysis is
>that it suggests rational responses, and of course scientific research
>and analysis can help to fuel sensible and carefully-judged
>responses. For each aspect of his analysis, he provided pointers to
>how science could help to address the decisions that needed to be
>made. It was important that "social wisdom" should grow in an effort
>to keep pace with rapidly developing technologies; and he cited the
>example of Scandinavian countries that, in his view, better
>demonstrated approaches to development that had a sustained emphasis
>on social justice.
>
>The plenary lecture of Michael Zgurovsky ("Interdisciplinary
>scientific data for sustainable development global simulation")
>suggested a practical approach to developing analytic tools for
>modeling sustainable development across the nations of the world. A
>numeric model of suitable metrics to describe the stability and
>security of individual nations could be built from a matrix of factors
>describing performance along the economic, ecologic, social and
>institutional dimensions - the "sustainable development gauging
>matrix" (SDGM). Sustainability, based on the UN declaration of 1996,
>is considered an important metric in characterising economic and
>political stability, and a number of entries in the SDGM demonstrated
>how many economically strong nations were still ranked low in terms of
>security of their societies. It was argued that global modeling in
>this multidimensional way was important in making well informed policy
>decisions.
>
>These global views were accompanied by a special presentation from
>Wataru Iwamoto, representing UNESCO, who described many of the
>initiatives in which UNESCO is playing a part to promote the
>information society. These include the promotion of open access or
>differential pricing for access to scientific information; the
>development of metadata to facilitate long-term archiving; the
>promotion of evidence-based decision making in national policies; and
>the recruitment of young scientists and other workers in these tasks.
>
>While supranational agencies are promoting evidence-based policy
>making, there is a practical need for high-quality technical
>structures to support the management and analysis of the large amounts
>of data involved, and in a plenary lecture "The EGEE infrastructure
>and its support for European scientific collaboration", Robert Jones
>described a particular collaborative effort to provide such a
>structure. EGEE is entering its third two-year phase of operation to
>provide and increase the capacity of a production computing Grid
>infrastructure. With support from over 50 countries in and beyond
>Europe, EGEE includes over 300 sites linked together in a
>collaborative model. Applications cover many fields, including
>high-energy physics, earth sciences and life sciences, and the system
>provides not only high-capacity, highly resilient hardware, but
>middleware linking contributing centres in coherent "virtual"
>organisations. It was acknowledged that data management across the
>various applications is still rudimentary compared with the hardware
>and middleware provision, but the quality of service provided is very
>high, and is promoting an enormous amount of new and exciting
>science. Although the current approach is still project-based, the
>ultimate goal of EGEE is to provide a long-term sustainable Grid
>infrastructure throughout Europe and collaborating partners.
>
>In the final plenary lecture, "Curating data? What about curating
>services and workflows?", Carole Goble presented a complementary
>approach to linking together complex scientific data-driven
>inquiries. In the life sciences, over a thousand databases are
>regularly used by bioinformaticians. They are increasingly disparate
>in structure and architecture, but are usually accessed through Web
>services. This allows the construction of workflows that combine,
>integrate, link, process, derive and curate data resources from any
>combination of these database sources. The workflows are instantiated
>as discrete modules within a computational framework, that can be
>exchanged, extended and linked as required. Workflows do have
>advantages, in that the choice of modules automatically documents the
>processes involved in managing data from a number of disparate
>sources. On the other hand, the individual modules are constantly
>evolving as living program segments, and so it is essential to capture
>the particular versions used in any application. Curation of such
>rapidly-changing components is not easy. Neither is validation,
>especially as a community of authors contributes workflow modules to a
>common pool. At this stage in their development, workflows are being
>generated by an active community, that is equally active in quality
>assessment and validation. They are carried along on the wave of
>enthusiasm for social computing and networking that underlies the "Web
>2.0" approach. The "bottom-up" approach to building solutions is in
>some ways at the opposite pole from the large-scale integrated
>architecture that can be seen in network infrastructures like EGEE;
>but it has a real potential to solve problems and perhaps to catalyse
>the development of a completely new approach to computer-assisted
>problem solving.
>
>Oral sessions
>-------------
>
>If the plenary sessions provided an opportunity to state and develop
>the overall theme of the conference, the multiplicity of parallel
>sessions provided ample evidence for the diversity of activities
>embraced by CODATA. Just a few examples of the session topics will
>illustrate this: Information Society, global climate change, Grid
>infrastructure, geophysical data systems and analysis, biodiversity,
>scientific capacity building, repositories for scientific data,
>materials: data exchange, nanotechnology, natural disasters and risk,
>e-science collaboraion, International Polar Year, biological and
>genetics data, etc. The full programme can be reviewed
>on the CODATA web site. However, a definite disadvantage of so many oral
>presentation sessions (up to 11 in parallel) is that the
>interdisciplinary nature of the conference becomes diluted, as each
>session focuses on a particular discipline, and it is impossible to
>see at one time how different communities face and tackle the same
>problems in their different environments. I would certainly recommend
>that future programme committees reduce drastically the number of
>parallel sessions, and work harder to ensure that each session
>explores topics of interest across subject boundaries. There would be
>merit in expanding greatly the number of posters presented, since
>there is clearly an enthusiasm for presenting the results of research,
>and a large poster session can generate much discussion and
>excitement.
>
>Among the sessions that I attended, almost at random given the choice,
>were a number of exciting astronomy sessions that reviewed many of the
>collaborative initiatives contributing to the Virtual Observatory
>projects characterising much contemporary astronomical work. A keynote
>talk by George Djorgovski was particularly good at demonstrating how
>the virtual observatories of astronomy sat within the broader context
>of e-science. Modern information technology hardware can - just about
>- keep up with the explosive growth in data volumes (large digital sky
>surveys currently collect 10 or 100 terabytes of data, and forthcoming
>ones will collect petabytes; the latest generation of telescopes can
>collect 30 TB per day). There are now real problems in keeping up with
>real-time data analysis, and the science is challenged not only by the
>data volume, but increasingly by its complexity, such as with
>panchromatic (multi-wavelength) views of the Universe, and the
>additional computational challenges of simulations. A particular point
>of note was the increasing reliance on computational modeling, so that
>computer science is in many areas becoming the "new mathematics" of
>scientific discovery.
>
>Other astronomy talks covered a range of large-scale observational
>projects, including Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian and European
>ventures. There were also discussions of the benefits of common data
>formats (FITS, VOTables), common interrogation languages and a common
>data model in unifying the discipline and increasing the synergy of
>collaborative projects. There was also a very nice presentation by
>Fabien Chereau of Stellarium and VirGO, open-source desktop
>planetarium applications that tap into the large databases of
>astronomical objects that are openly available, and allow both amateur
>and professional access to fundamental data.
>
>Two sessions on biological responses to low dose radiation illustrated
>the rather more mundane, but extraordinarily practical, benefits of
>careful collection and comparison of data from individual incidents -
>in this case the widespread exposure of human and other biological
>populations to radiation from the atomic bomb detonations in Japan and
>the Chernobyl reactor incident in Ukraine. A number of careful studies
>were reported, building up a more complete picture of long-term health
>effects from a (thankfully) very small number of direct observations;
>and variations in the epidemiology of various forms of leukaemia
>between the two cases provide an example of the new knowledge that can
>be gained.
>
>The session on long-term data and knowledge management surveyed a
>number of large-scale and successful approaches to archiving, such as
>those of the Earth Sciences Sector of Natural Resources Canada, NASA's
>Planetary Data System, and the data management and publishing
>activities of the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical
>Information (CISTI). Bob Chen of Columbia University made the very
>important point that governance and organisational sustainability are
>at least as important in building durable archives as the technical
>infrastructure and data storage capacity that is most often
>discussed. Arrangements to provide long-term archiving for data
>collected by the Center for International Earth Science Information
>Network (CIESIN) involve lengthy discussion with Columbia University
>Libraries to guarantee the preservation of existing data long after
>CIESIN itself may have disappeared. Other contributions in this
>session looked at the prospects for peer-reviewed data publication, to
>confer appropriate academic credit on data generators, managers and
>analysts, and to provide citable records; and what could be learned
>from the policies and norms for collaborative production and
>dissemination of scientific data sets from the activities of the
>open-source software developer community.
>
>A stimulating session on physical science: data quality and databases,
>which I was privileged to co-chair with Fedor Kuznetsov, included
>excellent surveys of science data quality, especially in applied
>sciences, as managed in China through application of national and
>international standards (Hu Lianglin); of the extensive and careful
>programmes of standard reference data evaluation as carried out by the
>National Center for Standard Reference Data in Korea (Chang Geung Kim,
>H. S. Suh et al.); of the many important physical databases throughout
>the Russian Federation (T. Golashvili), in which attention was drawn
>to the need to differentiate carefully between reference, recommended
>and standard data values; and in nuclear data science activities in
>India (S. Ganesan). This latter presentation included a vivid
>illustration of the importance of continuously updating working
>practices and associated documentation to reflect revised values of
>physical data, as failure to do so had led to a near-accident in an
>Indian nuclear reactor. Vigorous attempts to redress this problem, and
>energetic efforts to practise the highest quality of nuclear science
>in the power industry, demonstrate a maturity in Indian nuclear
>science that is reflected in the growth of international collaborative
>projects in nuclear science and technology, and in high-energy
>physics. The session also included a warning from a Russian
>high-energy physicist, Vladimir Ezhela, that physics journals needed
>to provide full machine-readable copies of numerical measured data as
>reported in their publications, to allow adequate refereeing and
>quality assurance. He provided the example of negative eigenvalues in
>the correlation matrix of certain combinations of the fundamental
>physical constants that would be obtained if the published values of
>the constants were used, and not their full-precision values. The IUCr
>of course requires deposition of experimental data to allow numerical
>peer review (and by the nature of our subject we can conduct most
>routine validation automatically); in discussions it was suggested
>that the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP)
>should be engaged to explore similar policies in physics; or that a
>CODATA Task Group might be a useful way to approach this. The session
>concluded with a challenging paper presented by Dong Bong Yang, Gun
>Woong Bahang and Sang Zee Lee that suggested a new natural units
>system to define all physical constants as well as the SI units by
>dimensionless numerical values.
>
>Finally, the session on data visualization approaches, which promised
>an interesting variety of examples, was disappointing because many
>speakers failed to show up. Nevertheless, Jean-Jacques Royer presented
>to the many local students present an excellent overview of the
>three-dimensional subsurface modelling carried out by his group at the
>GOCAD project, University of Nancy. I also demonstrated the IUCr
>approach to the interactive visualization of data as a feature of
>online crystallography journal articles.
>
>Awards
>------
>
>The CODATA Prize was awarded this year to Liu Chuang, Professor and
>Director of Global Change Information and Research Center at the
>Institute of Geography and Natural Resources, Chinese Academy of
>Sciences, who has been very actively involved as Co-Chair with the
>CODATA Task Group on the Preservation and Archiving of Scientific and
>Technical Data in Developing Countries, and who served on the ICSU
>Priority Area Assessment (PAA) Panel on Scientific Data and
>Information. Her lecture on receiving the CODATA Prize was entitled "A
>worldwide solution for bridging the digital divide for innovative
>research and development", and ranged widely over her many activities
>within CODATA and other organisations to promote archiving,
>development and innovation. Among the highlights were the creation and
>active development of the CODATA Task Group on Preservation and
>Archiving, various workshops, the development of an Open Data policy
>in China, the presentation by CODATA at the World Summit on the
>Information Society (WSIS) meeting in Tunis, the Berlin Declaration on
>open access, and the identification of bridging the digital divide as
>a strategic goal for CODATA following the ICSU PAA. She concluded by
>looking forward to the activities of the newly created United Nations
>Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID).
>
>At the same prize-giving ceremony, the Sangster Award 2008 for a young
>Canadian Scientist was awarded to Sabrina Fortin, who subsequently
>presented a paper on "Normative models to manage collective research
>resources - from commons to contracts: the case of human populational
>databases" in the parallel session on biomedical data sharing and
>informatics.
>
>In this, and in many other ways, the CODATA conference made strong
>efforts to showcase young talent. A number of presentations were
>singled out as contributions from young scientists. A Young Scientist
>Roundtable was held, from which came the idea that a CODATA Working
>Group should be formed by young scientists, with a longer-term goal of
>establishing a full Task Group. The idea of a CODATA Prize for Young
>Scientists was floated. For me, however, the most direct way to reach
>out to young scientists was to engage directly with the many students
>and youg researchers who were able to attend sessions, and who helped
>out as part of the local organisation. This was a real benefit of
>holding such a conference in a university environment, and the
>cheerful hospitality and enthusiasm of the local students was greatly
>appreciated, and will not easily be forgotten.
>
>Summary
>-------
>
>As always, I found the CODATA conference a stimulating meeting,
>providing a useful cross-disciplinary survey of progress in data
>science. The IUCr has benefited from hearing many of the
>presentations, and I hope it has also provided stimulus and input to
>participants through our involvement. I certainly took advantage of
>many informal opportunities to make new contacts, open up new
>possibilities for collaboration, and indeed make new friendships. I
>hope that the next conference will be structured with fewer parallel
>sessions, in order to maximise the opportunities for exploring
>interdisciplinary themes, and I also hope that CODATA will continue to
>value the contributions of the more laboratory-based sciences in
>emphasising the necessity for quality assurance, critical peer review
>and proper annotation and management of scientific data.
>
>Brian McMahon
>CODATA Representative
>
>==============================================================================
>_______________________________________________
>Epc mailing list
>Epc@iucr.org
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>
>-----------------------
Lachlan M. D. Cranswick
Contact outside working hours /
  Coordonnees en dehors des heures de travail:
NEW E-mail / courriel:  lachlanc *at* magma.ca
Home Tel: (613) 584-4226 ; Cell/mobile: (613) 401-6254
WWW: http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/
        P.O. Box 2057, Deep River, Ontario, Canada, K0J 1P0

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