Summary of the 2nd Data Management Workshop in Cologne

The workshop had a comprehensive program with 12 invited talks and an overall of 35 presented posters. The talks were selected to cover a wide range of data management related topics, such as the funding agency perspective, the policy and metadata standards perspectives, software and application aspects, as well as talks about well known and successful research data management projects and approaches in different domains. Additionally, the infrastructure provider perspective from the libraries, publishers and the computing centres were present.

The program of invited talks was enriched by 35 poster presentations in the foyer of the lecture hall. The schedule of the talk sessions had extended (1 hour long) coffee and lunch breaks, allowing the participants to engage in discussions about the talks and posters.

On the first day Dr. Stefan Winkler-Nees and Brit Redöhl from the German Research Foundation (DFG) started the program of 12 invited talks, detailing the funding program for data management related research projects and infrastructure. Kevin Ashley, director of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) gave an inspiring talk on selected news and opinions in the Research Data Management (RDM) realm. The second session of day one, gave some perspectives and inspirations from outside the RDM community. Arnulf Christl delivered a great and inspiring talk on the aspects of openness in software, data and related licensing issues. Tomi Kaupinnen, gave some excellent example of how to make use of and apply open linked data technology for the general good and progress in (data) science.

The third session of day three was about two successful projects. Jane Greenberg talked about the Dryad repository, giving an overview of the data publishing system and its metadata workflows. She also gave some guidance and smart thoughts on general aspects of data publication and its citation. Cyril Pommier presented the data management system of the PHENOME project. Detailing on the sophisticated data integration approaches and implementation aspects of the system.

In the first session of day two, Prof. Dr. Weniger director of the Neanderthal Museum gave a talk about the NESPOS database system, which is a community based data management system for paleoanthropological data. Katie Green of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) gave a very interesting overview talk about the excellent data management work at ADS. In the second session of day two, Sarah Callaghan presented smart applications and solutions of the data management and data publication workflows at the British Atmospheric Data Centre. Followed by Marjan Grootveld, of the dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), explaining the data management planning in a federated landscape, detailing the dutch front office - back office model for implementing RDM at research institutions. In the last session of the Workshop, Wolfram Horstmann, director of the State and Unniversity Library of Göttingen (SUB), delivered very well thoughts about data services and policy landscape between universitys, professional publisher and fuinding agencies. Hans Pfeiffenberger from the Alfred Wegner Institute (AWI) and chief editor of Earth Science Data (ESSD), explained his thoughts on Data Publishing with a capital P, which was an interesting mix of examples and lessons learned from data publishing within the ESSD.

Also noteworthy was the activity on twitter during the workshop, which had some positive effect to foster the conversations between the participants. The talks were recorded and are available on youtube and are linked from the workshop program website. Please excuse the sub-optimal sound quality, it was the first time we recorded talks in this lecture hall, and we had a misconfiguration according the capture of the audio signal.