Open Technology and Research
– Cross-disciplinary short talks session
Wednesday 18 September, 10:30 – 11:15 @ Room 13, Floor 2
Moderator: Pieter Colpaert, University of Ghent
Talks:
-
Bringing the Open Source revolution to Open Data
– James Smith, Web Developer, Open Data Institute
Open source software development has been revolutionised by the adoption of tools like git and particularly web sites like GitHub. By lowering the bar for participation, these tools have an incredible impact on the quality and range of open source software. In contrast, open data is still its infancy as far as tooling and processes go. In this talk, we’ll explore how the tools of open source can revolutionise open data publishing in the same way. When I can fork your open dataset, fix errors, and easily get my changes integrated back in, we all win.
-
dat: if git was designed for tabular data
– Max Ogden, Open Web Programmer
[dat]is a new project that will bridge open data communities by letting anyone plug in their data and then sync it with others, similar to the way that git makes source code syncable to distribute programming efforts. [dat] intends to work with huge datasets – billions of rows – and work with a variety of popular databases and programming environments.
-
Open Science
– Kamila Markram, Frontiers
As scientists, funders and governments seek to establish more transparent and democratic processes, scholarly publishing is undergoing a radical transformation. In the rapidly evolving web 2.0 age, publishers need to go beyond making research as freely and widely available to disseminating research for maximum outreach and impact. Frontiers is the first and only publisher to combine open-access publishing with an ecosystem of open science tools to empower scientists to democratize scholarly publishing and dissemination through the use of advanced web-analytics, crowd-sourcing and an integrated social network specially tailored to the needs of researchers and science-enthusiasts. At Frontiers, the Tiering System uses web-analytics and online demographics to democratically select outstanding research articles and vulgarize them with the goal to make them more accessible to the wider research communities and the general public. The combination between open-access publishing, dissemination via an integrated research network and using web-analytics to pinpoint to interesting research to make it more accessible to the general public, leads to measurably increased impact.
-
Leveraging open scientific data using R
– Karthik Ram, Developer, R Open Science – rOpenSci
Science is in the midst of a dramatic transformation that is being driven by increasing access to large amounts of heterogeneous data. Various scientific datasets are widely available on the web but the tools and culture necessary to leverage existing data. To foster and support a new generation of data-driven science, we started rOpenSci as an integrated effort to build tools and training to help scientists access data repositories through the R statistical programming environment. In this workshop we will demonstrate our tools and offer advice and support for participants to build their own.
-
Opening meteorological data
– Nicolas Baldeck, Founder, OpenMeteoData
Most activities are dependent on weather. But getting quality data is still a problem. This will be a quick overview about weather data availability, and some practical ideas on how open data and open science could help.
