Susanne Mocken und Dirk von Suchodoletz
RTG seminar on January 16th, 2019
The speakers are members of the virtual organization "Research Data Management Group" (RDMG), which was created in beginning of 2018 at the university together with colleagues from the University Library (UB) and the Freiburg Research Services (FRS). The talk introduces the topic Research Data Management (RDM) in an highly digitized scientific landscape. It will present the core concepts of research data management, e.g. the data life cycle and the FAIR principlesm, and define basics in the area of digital data, meta data, as well as persistent identifiers for long term addressing of research data. Further on it will deliver an institutional perspective that deals with planning and realising strategies for research data management at the university of Freiburg and within the state of Baden-Württemberg. Besides the strategic orientation of universities or research environments this part includes organizational aspects such as certification, licensing, access plans and resources to provide research data. In particular providing access to research data externally produces new organisational and financial challenges. Such a service needs to be properly financed and integrated into scientific governance frameworks to decide about data sets.
Researchers have to deal with the specific aspects of their field when facing research data management and find solutions that cover their practical fields and problem statements. The long term perspective of access introduces the issue of reproducibility of research data. The ongoing development of execution environments leads sooner or later to incompatibilities of research data, which hinders or even prevents a long term usage. Providing research data for long term archiving hence requires detailed information (metadata) about the environment it was created in. With this information, virtualisation and emulation enable further usage and even reproducibility, even on differing execution environments. Virtual research environments (evaluated in the joint ViCE project) help to complement the research data management of results and primary data by formalizing the abstraction of (complex) scientific workflows from underlying hardware to make them more versatile, exchangeable and both archiveable and reusable in the long run.