JISC

Overview

This project (ERIM) sets out to specify in practical terms how data management can be enabled and supported in research projects, particular to support re-use and what can be thought of as ’repurposing’.

The project will establish the state of the art and then understand the combination of technical, contextual, social and legal barriers to re-use. In parallel the opportunities and benefits of information and data set re-use will be made. A key factor to establish will be what structures, formats, metadata and so on are needed to make these information and data sets amenable to later re-use and reinterpretation.

Aims and objectives

• Establish the state of the art in data curation and re-use. It will also establish the principles for curation and re-use used in other sectors in both research and non-research spaces
• Identify and characterise up to six case studies of representative datasets for scrutiny
• Identify opportunities for and the benefits of research data re-use and ‘repurposing’
• Identify the contextual, technical, legal and social barriers to the re-use and repurposing of research data
• Establish whether and what data might be used in its raw form, what will require reprocessing and how
• Understand what contextual information is required for research data to be understood for the purpose of re-use 
• Provide data management plans for selected representative data sets

Project methodology

The research in the ERIM project will be carried out by Dr Mansur Darlington and Dr Tom Howard of the Bath IdMRC and by Alex Ball of UKOLN. The work will be supervised by Professor Chris McMahon and Professor Steve Culley (Bath IdMRC) and Liz Lyon (UKOLN).
Preliminary studies will identify the spectrum of research data types encountered by the engineering disciplines and then more broadly the research establishment. From these disciplines representative research activities and data types will be selected as case studies. These case studies will form the core research material for the project as a whole.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• Report on the state of the art in data curation for reuse and repurposing
• Report identifying and characterising case study material, plus example audited case study data
• Report on opportunities for research reuse and repurposing of data, dealing particularly deal with barriers to such. 
• Requirement specification for a research data management approach and infrastructure, together with representative Data Management Plans
• Report on initial results with the pilot experimental approaches and infrastructures aimed at meeting the requirement
• Recommendations for the development of DMPs in related domains, and model/template DMPs for the exemplar data chosen in the project