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  • Created 24 Feb 2014

Primer

Welcome to the Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative, an inclusive community-wide effort led by the National Cancer Informatics Program (NCIP) Nano Working Group (Nano WG) to:

  • Capture and evaluate how data on nanomaterial characterization and behavior are managed across a wide range of nanomaterial data resources, and
  • Develop recommendations and strategies that support individual project goals while enabling cohesion and interoperability between resources.

The Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative

This ongoing volunteer project within the nanoinformatics community will generate discussions and work products that include a series of papers covering sub-topics of interest within nanomaterial data curation. Each of these papers will be developed by a team of co-authors within the NCIP Nano WG, who will solicit input from an established list of nanomaterial data stakeholders to represent the state of the field, evaluate the current practices and develop recommendations for the field as it develops. Membership in the NCIP Nano WG and the data stakeholders group are both open.

Brief Background on Nanomaterial Data Curation

A maturing field within library science, scientific data curation is a topic of growing interest within the nanomaterial and growing nanoinformatics communities because as a newly developing area of science, the very methods, protocols and parameters guiding data generation are emerging concurrently with the data themselves on materials, their performance, and their impacts. Addressing issues such as uncertainty, reproducibility, and interoperability as early as possible stands to help the community leverage research investments and enable iterative feedback between different groups to help address important challenges such as reducing collateral negative impacts and decreasing the time from development to market for this new class of technologies. Resources developing to organize and utilize these data represent a broad range of data scopes, goals, and stages of development, but one common aspect shared across all nanoinformatics resources is that data must be curated into them. For this reason, the NCIP Nano WG seeks to characterize the state of the field by focusing on data curation, and to create a communal conversation around best approaches for moving forward.

Data curation includes all aspects of the process of assimilating data into centralized repositories or interoperable formats: how the information sources are sourced and parsed into datasets; how the data are organized within cyberinfrastructures; how the data are formatted for interoperability; and how further investigations can be carried out to seek additional detail for greater data quality. This initiative will help to establish an understanding of what a wide range of stakeholders in data curation mean when they undertake this process.

How to participate as a Stakeholder Liaison

The Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative wants to include as many perspectives as possible in order to serve as a useful barometer of progress and a comprehensive representation of future recommendations. We are therefore identifying liaisons who can provide input on behalf of themselves or the larger stakeholder organizations they represent, by answering a series of sub-topic related questions that will be generated and solicited for each of the nanomaterial data curation sub-topic papers generated by the Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative.

For the time being our goal is to provide a snapshot of current practices, so stakeholder liaisons can expect to complete one generalized liaison profile upon agreeing to participate, and to receive one set of questions to answer for each of the sub-topics addressed by an NCIP NanoWG author group. It is our hope that this list could concurrently serve as an ongoing resource group, for reference by other nanoinformatics community activities in addition to the Nanomaterial Data Curation Initiative. By taking a targeted crowd-sourced wiki approach, we hope maintain a living resource and up-to-date community connections with low barriers to participation. If you want to participate as a stakeholder liaison please contact Mervi Heiskanen heiskame@mail.nih.gov

How to participate as an Author

Authors of the papers on nanomaterial data curation issues are members of the NCIP Nano WG, which is an open community. Please go to the NCIP Nano WG website to request membership. The hub provides a very specific and clear set of steps for developing the sub-topic papers as well as a template outline to organize the content.


Outline and process for writing curation papers https://nciphub.org/groups/nanotechnologydatacurationinterestgroup/wiki/CurationPapers

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