Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network

Abstract

This paper aims to enrich the current understanding of data curation prevalent in e-Science by drawing on an ethnographic study of one of the longest-running efforts at longterm consistent data collection with open data sharing in an environment of interdisciplinary collaboration. In such a context we identify a set of salient characteristics of ecological research and data that shape the data stewardship approach of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. We describe the actual practices through which LTER information managers attend to the extended temporal scale of long-term research and data sets both through data care work and information infrastructure development. We discuss the issues of long-term and continuity that represent central challenges for data curation and stewardship. We argue for more efforts to be directed to understanding what is at stake with a long-term perspective and differing temporal scales as well as to studying actual practices of data curation and stewardship in order to provide more coherent understandings of e-Science solutions and technologies.

From Artefacts to Infrastructures

“…A further JCSCW contribution explicitly employing an infrastructure perspective investigates data curation practices longitudinally within an e-Science data collection project (Karasti et al 2006). Key to this analysis is the role of standards for terminology (metadata) and the relationship with the different local 'dialects' used by the involved communities of scientists.…”

Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment

“…It involves changing common views and metaphors on infrastructure: from transparency to visibility, from substrate to substance, from short term to long term (Karasti, Baker, & Halkola, 2006;Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Usually perceived as something "just there," ready-at-hand, completely transparent, something upon which something else "runs" or "operates" (a system of railroad tracks upon which rail cars run; a computer network upon which a research lab operates or disseminates data like the WWW), any infrastructure that has been the target topic of activities has probably also been the object of passionate debates -for the engineers in charge of building the railroad system or for the scientists and technologists in charge of developing the network.…”

Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research in Practice: Lessons from Inter- and Transdisciplinary Research in the Austrian Eisenwurzen

“…These projects share the common feature of using data from ecological monitoring sites (Zöbelboden, Johnsbachtal, Lake Lunz), which are available at a high spatio-temporal resolution. Connected to this data source is a joint challenge of working with big data from the monitoring sites, which has also been described at other LTER monitoring sites [35]. Two of the four projects addressing ecosystem processes integrate a substantial socio-ecological perspective: In CentForCSink, historians cooperate with ecologists to study long-term changes in forest management and their effects on forest carbon sinks [36,37].…”

“…Availability of and access to data varies greatly among the three research strands discussed in this paper, resulting from the different types of "data" that each strand works with. In ecological research using monitoring sites, data tend to be overly abundant, and problems are mostly related to managing long-term data [35] and upscaling the data to scales for which other sources, e.g., historical records, are available. Professional management of the large data supplied in the LTER monitoring sites is a major prerequisite in this task.…”