Quixote meeting on August 25 at Zaragoza, Spain

[Pablo Echenique]

Dear friends,

all of you and the people you consider could be interested are invited to the meeting described below.

We know it is a difficult date, but it would be fantastic if some of you could make it.

Best,

  Pablo. 

-----------

Next August 25 the meeting “Research data management: The experience of the Quixote project for Quantum Chemistry data. Can it be extended into a collection of research data management repositories?” will be held in Zaragoza to promote the creation of research data repositories for different fields and different scales (from a laboratory repository to a repository for a complete research field), and using the the Quixote Project for Quantum Chemistry as a conducting example (http://quixote.wikispot.org/).

The meeting addresses repository managers, researchers, and any others interested in research data management in Spain. We expect active discussions during the meeting. We would like to see that this meeting fosters the creation of new data repositories and that new collaborations begin here too.

Description of Quixote: the Quixote Project is developing the infrastructure required to convert output from a number of different molecular quantum chemistry packages to a common semantically rich, machine-readable format and to build repositories of QC results. Such an infrastructure offers benefits at many levels. The standardised representation of the results will facilitate software interoperability, for example making it easier for analysis tools to take data from different QC packages, and will also help with archival and deposition of results. The repository infrastructure, which is lightweight and built using Open software components, can be implemented at individual researcher, project, organisation or community level, offering the exciting possibility that in future many of these QC results can be made publically available, to be searched and interpreted just as crystallography and bioinformatics results are today. More about Quixote at http://quixote.wikispot.org/ and a test repository at http://quixote.ch.cam.ac.uk/

The meeting will have two sections: The first one will introduce the Quixote project, as well as existing national and international research data management initiatives. The talks will be short (15-20 minutes), with 10 minutes for questions. The second and core section of the meeting will be a discussion session, aiming to evaluate the needs of researchers and repository managers regarding data management repositories and tools, and to plan collaborations for creating a research data management infrastructure in Spain as a collection of repositories.

 Programme: Thursday, August 25.

       * 11:00 am Presentation

       * 11:15 am First talk

       * 11:45 am Second talk

       * 12:15 pm Coffee

       * 12:45 pm Third talk

       * 13:15 pm Fourth talk

       * 14:00 pm Lunch

       * 15:30 pm Discussion

       * 16:30 pm Coffee

       * 17:00 pm Discussion

       * 17:45 pm End of meeting. Conclusions.

 

Preliminary titles for the talks are:

- 'STM Research data management initiatives in Spain and abroad: an overview'

Pablo de Castro, SONEX Workgroup for Research Output Notification and Exchange

- 'From Databases in QC 2010, ZCAM, Sep 2010 onwards: a brief history of Quixote'

Jorge Estrada, Instituto de Química Física "Rocasolano", CSIC, Spain, and Departmento de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular y Celular, Universidad de Zaragoza

- 'The Quixote Project: a pioneering work in managing Computational Chemistry research data'

Pablo Echenique, Instituto de Química Física "Rocasolano", CSIC, Spain, and Departamento de Física Teórica, Universidad de Zaragoza

- 'Entering a new era in data management: some reflections'

Peter Murray-Rust, Centre for Molecular Science Informatics, University of Cambridge