Given that there are several teams working on data sharing initiatives, it is helpful to share perspectives and ideas that can potentially cross-fertilize efforts and hopefully facilitate collaborations. Chuck Jones and the Stoa Consortium alerted me to the impressive work underway on the Nabonidus project. Sam Wood of the Nabonidus Project kindly agreed to an interview to discuss their efforts with the DDIG community.
[Question] What is the rationale behind Nabonidus and what needs do you see it fulfilling? Is it primarily a project data management tool or a system for digital publication of project datasets?
[SW] Nabonidus was built to make the task of gathering and analyzing archaeological excavation data easy. We hope that Nabonidus will not only be a data management tool and a system for digital publication but will go much further.
The more data there is in Nabonidus the more useful a tool it will become. Firstly the archaeological community would gain access to this raw excavation data which is not an easy thing to do currently. And secondly we would get a new angle on the data with Nabonidus reporting tools and multiple excavation analysis. In our opinion the ability to search across multiple excavations with just a few clicks is very compelling....
[Question] On your blog (http://nabonidus.blogspot.com/), you make it very clear that investigators retain ownership of content in your system. You also emphasize data privacy protection on your site. Is this in response to specific concerns from your user community? Do you think that most users have strong intellectual property concerns, and is this an important factor in shaping your development efforts?
[SW] Yes and yes! All our users have strong feelings about the ownership of their data. On the one hand they need to keep their data private to enable them to publish findings and papers. On the other hand they realize the need and benefits of sharing that data.
So we built Nabonidus so that users can decide how public or private their data will be. This can be set at an area or site level so projects can make some or all of their data public as they see fit. This means initially we won’t have a great deal of publicly available data but as users become comfortable with the system and publish their findings this public archive will grow....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/21/2006 09:53:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
