I am on the Academy Program Committee for this conference. They could use
some papers with 'hands on' experience on bringing data together and
integrating them in order to provide the basis for analysis. The many and
diverse problems of integration of disparate data that go beyond just
format issues.
pk
------------------------------------
The Conference on Scientific and Technical Data Exchange and Integration
Sponsored by U.S. National Committee for CODATA
December 15-17, 1997
Natcher Conference Center
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD
Call for Papers
The exchange of scientific and technical (S&T) data among different
computing environments and across diverse scientific and engineering
disciplines presents major problems that hinder full exploitation of
computer-based modeling, the Internet, modern scientific databases and new
computer technology. The U.S. National Committee for CODATA is sponsoring
the first major interdisciplinary conference on this subject on December
15-17, 1997, in Bethesda, MD. The conference has three main purposes.
* To identify areas, with special emphasis on interdisciplinary needs, in
which data exchange is important
* To identify major S&T data exchange efforts already underway or in planning
* To foster serious and significant cooperation among scientific and
engineering disciplines, data types, and governmental and non-governmental
organizations.
The conference will consist of four types of sessions: plenary invited
lectures; contributed papers (which will be posters); demonstrations; and
small discussion sections. Contributed papers and demonstrations are
invited on the following topics:
Discipline-specific data exchange activities and requirements
Interdisciplinary data exchange activities and requirements
Federally supported data exchange programs
Definitions of scientific and technical metadata issues
The computer science of data exchange and integration
The impact of the Internet and the World Wide Web on S&T data
exchange and
integration
Future needs for data exchange and integration for scientific and
technical data
The contributed papers will play a major role in the conference by
identifying existing activities and approaches which hopefully will provide
direction and insight for further activities.
A 200 word (maximum) abstract should be submitted (preferably by E-mail) by
May 15, 1997 to
The Conference on Scientific and Technical Data Exchange
National Research Council
Attention: U.S. National Committee for CODATA
2101 Constitution Avenue
Washington, DC 20418
(202) 334-2154 (fax)
(202) 334-3061 (tel)
puhlir@nas.edu
For further information, contact U.S. National CODATA as given above or
John Rumble, Program Chair, National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Building 820, Room 113, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, E-mail john.rumble@nist
gov, telephone (301) 975-2200.
Notification of acceptance will be given by August 15, 1997.
Additional Background
By data exchange is meant several things: the transfer of large amounts of
data from one set of software to other software; extracting small amounts
of data from one or more data sources for specific use; and the creation of
a linked or integrated data system with multiple data sources. Other
possibilities exist. Data exchange has two major components: definition of
the stream of bits and bytes that actually transmit data items and fields,
and the contextual meaning of individual data items and fields.
S&T disciplines and applications have begun addressing data exchange
issues, but progress has been slow and difficult for a variety of reasons.
Scientists are often not accustomed to formal standards. Discipline
experts, even though quite literate in computation and database management,
lack expertise in information modeling and exchange standards. Metadata
are not well defined across diverse scientific areas. As a result,
interdisciplinary data exchange has been difficult to promote and rarely
implemented.
Consider for a moment geographic information. Many applications
need such information: to locate physically the source of samples, to
describe the range of a phenomenon, or to specify the location of an event.
Today many geographic information systems serve diverse communities of
users, and several efforts to develop standards for exchanging data among
these systems have been proposed. Yet progress to develop
interdisciplinary protocols has been slow. Other types of scientific data,
such as biological nomenclature, chemical and engineering material
identification and temporal data, suffer the same problem. Many uses for
these data exist outside the scientific disciplines that generate them, yet
accepted methods for exchanging these data remain elusive.
In Finding the Forest in the Trees, The Challenge of Combining Diverse
Environmental Data, the U.S. National Committee for CODATA clearly
documented case studies where data interfacing, defined in that report as
the "coordination, combination or integration of data for the purpose of
modeling, correlation, pattern analysis, hypotheses testing, and field
investigation at various scales," was necessary to achieve full value of
research investment. Data interfacing is founded upon the standards and
protocols agreed to by different scientific disciplines to exchange data.
Particular emphasis must be put on the role of metadata in this data exchange.
About CODATA
The Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) is an
interdisciplinary committee organized under the International Council of
Scientific Unions (ICSU). CODATA is concerned with all types of
quantitative data resulting from experimental measurements or observations
in the physical, biological, geological, and astronomical sciences.
Particular emphasis is given to data management problems common to
different scientific disciplines and to data used outside the field in
which they were generated. The general objectives are the improvement of
the quality and accessibility of data, as well as the methods by which data
are acquired, managed, and analyzed; the facilitation of international
cooperation among those collecting, organizing, and using data; and the
promotion of an increased awareness in the scientific and technical
community of the importance of these activities.
The U.S. National Committee for CODATA is organized by the National
Research Council to administer activities within the United States related
to CODATA. The Committee is funded by several federal agencies. Over the
past decade, the Committee has performed a number of studies that
identified and highlighted issues related to maximizing the availability
and usability of scientific and technical data. This national conference
builds upon those studies and is intended to spur further progress and
cooperation in data exchange and integration.
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