Continuing Education in the Field of Data Management

The course represents the first formal further education program for data stewards in Austria. Led by Claudia Plant – professor for data mining – this English-language course lasts two semesters part-time and links the latest findings on research data management, open science and open research with the tasks of data stewards. Based on the results of the FAIR Data Austria project, the course will foster peer-to-peer learning and allow the students to quickly become active members of the international data steward community.

Further information

Author: Tereza Kalová (FAIR Office Austria – University of Vienna)

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In their poster abstract Magdalena Szuflita-Żurawska and Piotr Krajewski state:

“Our poster is essential for understanding the process of creating a community of practice in the context of Open Science. Building such a community and at the same time being part of the culture change that offers openness in science is challenging. No single researcher or librarian would be able to achieve those results alone. Gdańsk Tech Library’s strategy to popularise and practice Open Science requires many actions supported by a team of people with different competencies.”

More background information and poster

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At the spring workshop on 28 April 2022, existing and new topics were worked on in several breakout sessions. The current GO Unite! working groups are:

1. Connecting the Network (Monika Linne, monika.linne@gesis.org)

In this working group, relevant RDM topics are identified that require stronger networking within the community and between RDM initiatives. The aim is to avoid reinventing the wheel and parallel work on identical topics or to exchange experiences on specific RDM issues. The topics of the spring workshop were:

• Central collection of RDM training materials: DINI/nestor Sub Working Group Training/Fortbildungen: https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/uag_fdm/pages/home.php
• Development of a digital expert platform
• Establishment of RDM in curricula (Volker Schwartze, volker.schwartze@uni-jena.de; Annette Strauch-Davey, straucha@uni-hildesheim.de; Florian Strauß, florian.strauss@tu-clausthal.de)
• Collegial Consulting as a form of low threshold Counseling in a self-directed group: Offer of the Sub Working Group Training/Fortbildungen (Britta Petersen, b.petersen@rz.uni-kiel.de)

2. Research Ethics (Annette Strauch-Davey, straucha@uni-hildesheim.de)

The topic of research ethics is an important part of all scientific disciplines, but the content is not yet sufficiently known. In this working group, a discussion should therefore first take place of how awareness can be raised in the RDM community and how support can be provided for researchers. In addition, an international network is aimed for, since the topic is already more advanced in other countries.

3. RDM Description Model (Patrick Helling, patrick.helling@uni-koeln.de)

At this year’s GO Unite! spring workshop, the “RDM description model” working group discussed possible approaches for formalizing consultation meetings in RDM. These can be used as an informational basis for developing a framework to formally describe RDM theory and practice. First and foremost, the working group noticed that RDM competence centers would very much welcome further exchange on the following aspects:

• Concepts for transferring competencies in research data management;
• How to conduct FDM consultation meetings;
• How to document FDM consultation meetings;
• How to design subject-specific FDM consultation.

These topics were addressed in two follow-up workshops of the WG (in German):

• GO Unite! workshop, 05 May 2022: Konzepte zur Durchführung & Protokollierung von Beratungsgesprächen im FDM
• GO Unite! workshop, 12 May 2022: Muster in FDM-Bedarfen – Versuch einer formalen Beschreibung von FDM-Bedarfsstrukturen

The results of the workshops will be published in a joint publication. Further follow-up workshops are planned for the second half of 2022.

4. Allocation, collection and visibility of research data from your own institution (Markus Putnings, markus.putnings@fau.de; Esther Asef, asef@ub.fu-berlin.de)

The working group “assignment, collection, and visibility of research data at institutions” focused on three core questions during a breakout session at the GO Unite! spring workshop:

• First, approaches to the collection of recommendations / best practices were discussed. Here, the focus was particularly on the identification of necessary steps to retrieve research data stored in different repositories and produced at a specific institution, e.g. a university.
• Secondly, to improve the retrieval of research data stored in various infrastructures but produced at a specific institution, the group discussed possible ways for the GO Unite! community to address such infrastructures and which specific demands could be defined.
• Finally, strategies for a consolidated search of research data deposited in different repositories were debated.

5. Internationalization (Anja Busch, a.busch@zbw.eu)

Participants of the breakout session on “internationalization” brainstormed the future design of exchange across borders. There is great interest in addressing one’s needs or experiences with the international community and gaining new impetus for activities. During the breakout session, (1) international guest keynotes, (2) topics of other GO Unite! working groups (such as research ethics, RDM in the university curriculum) and (3) exchange programmes were considered for international perspectives. All approaches provide an opportunity to promote cross-border interaction and to benefit from the experience of the international network.

“Internationalization” as a topic offers the potential for a vibrant and interesting exchange. All ideas and potential measures raised a lot of interest among GO Unite! members. What is missing is a contact person from the community at the moment. Whoever is interested in filling the international exchange with life is welcome to contact the GO Unite! spokespersons Monika Linne (monika.linne@gesis.org), Patrick Helling (patrick.helling@uni-koeln.de) and Anja Busch (a.busch@zbw.eu).

In the meantime, we are welcoming feedback on two questions in this Google doc:

• In which topics/projects/initiatives in the international environment are you interested?
• Please share valuable contacts of projects or initiatives that could be of value for GO Unite!

Even if you weren’t able to join the workshop, you are cordially invited to participate within the existing working groups or to introduce new topics that you would like to promote in the GO Unite! network. If you are interested in collaborating within the topics, please contact the responsible persons, who are indicated in brackets behind the respective topic. We look forward to working with you!

Monika Linne, monika.linne@gesis.org; Patrick Helling, patrick.helling@uni-koeln.de; Anja Busch, a.busch@zbw.eu

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The Training Task Force of the FAIR Data Austria project has created an Open Educational Resources (OER) package for Research Data Management (RDM) and recently published them on the website of FAIR Office Austria. It includes brief information, videos, quizzes and further links on RDM topics in German and English.

The compilation Open Educational Resources Research Data Management covers the basics of research data management and gathers resources and tools available for different stages of the research process. There are no prerequisites and anyone interested in the topic is welcome to learn about research data management!

The compilation topics

Large pool of high-quality RDM training resources were viewed, selected, clearly and uniformly compiled, and supplemented with additional elements where required to create materials on nine RDM topics that support the long-term preservation, access, reuse and publishing of data.

The compilation introduces what a data management plan (DMP) is and why it is important, whatever your career stage, and helps you understand the FAIR principles. Also, it sheds light on Open Science and why we should pay attention to metadata, persistent identifiers (PID) and file formats in research data management.

Reuse

Unless otherwise stated, the collection is available with a CC BY 4.0 license. The pages or the individual elements can be used for the creation of information and training materials, as long as the source is acknowledged. Currently, the pages are being prepared in form of LiaScript and will be published on Github and available for adaptation and reuse.

Contact
fairdata_training@lists.univie.ac.at

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The acronym FAIR standards for FINDABILITY, ACCESSIBILITY, INTEROPERABILITY, and REUSABILITY for research products/outputs such as metadata, data, software and more. With implementation of FAIR practices, GFISCO and the national offices want to support the development of an internet of FAIR data and services to benefit research and education.

Register here to join the launch of the Danish GO FAIR office.

The launch is an open and virtual event. The language for the event is English.

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The work on DAMAP and the FAIR Data Austria (FDA) project are featured in an implementation story published by the FAIRsFAIR project. The work supports “Turning FAIR into Reality” as recommended in the EC Expert Group on FAIR report.

The FAIRsFAIR Implementation & Adoption Stories team interviewed Tomasz Miksa to share the good practice and provide an insight into creating a machine-actionable DMP tool, DAMAP, that helps researchers to plan for FAIR data and support the creation of FAIR data and to integrate this tool with institutional services that respond to the needs identified in the DMP.

This effort has gained support from FAIR Data Austria, a project running from January 2020 to December 2022 to strengthen knowledge exchange between Austrian universities and develop training, tools and support services to manage data in accordance with the FAIR principles throughout the whole research lifecycle. (Blumesberger et al., 2021)

• Taking advantage of a new standard

Funding bodies and other policy-makers are more concerned with DMPs. The machine-actionable DMP is used to make the DMP interoperable, automated and increasingly standardized.
The Center for Research Data Management at TU Wien offers support to researchers to put the machine-actionable DMP idea into practice across the whole research data lifecycle.

• Coordinating service provision within and across universities

DAMAP aims to improve university internal workflows, e.g. allowing reporting on storage needs that have been highlighted in DMPs and using this information to provision for the expected storage needs, that would help the relevant units in the university reflect on their own workflows and market their offers better to researchers.

When a researcher now picks one of the storage options in the DAMAP tool, details on data storage are automatically populated for them. This should support researchers in making the right storage choices, to ensure the data can be made FAIR.

• Making the most of standards

DAMAP follows the DMP template guidelines issued by Science Europe and applies the RDA maDMP application profile taking their guidance and evaluation criteria into account when supporting the researcher in answering the questions.

• Integrating the DMP tool with institutional workflows

Managing expectations and demand for services as researchers’ awareness of these available services is a core challenge in integrating the DMP tool with institutional workflows. The DMP workflow integration with storage provision has led to useful synergies being identified, which may help bring researchers and providers in closer contact. For DAMAP we get synergies by asking the service providers quality of service questions and they had to figure these questions out for the first time. Further conversations are ongoing to address DAMAP’s adoption of standards.

DAMAP

DAMAP is currently being developed by TU Wien and TU Graz and it is available open source for everyone to install at their premises [code below]. It is based on data management plans (maDMPs) concept to facilitate the creation of data management plans (DMPs) for researchers. The tool is closely integrated into the institutional environment and it helps researchers to generate an initial DMP that they can export as a Word document and then customize it further to be communicated and shared across stakeholders, repositories and institutions.
The content of DAMAP is based on Science Europe’s Practical Guide to the International Alignment of Research Data Management.

Further Readings and References

• Discover the full story: Leveraging machine-actionable DMPs to build RDM infrastructure (Zenodo)
• More FAIR stories: FAIRsFAIR Implementation & Adoption Stories
• Read more on how maDMPs can be used in an institution:
  • Tomasz Miksa, Simon Oblasser, and Andreas Rauber. Automating research data management using machine-actionable data management plans. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 13(2), Dec 2021, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3490396
• Learn about other novel applications of maDMPs:
  • João Cardoso, Leyla Jael Castro, and Tomasz Miksa. Interconnecting Systems Using Machine-Actionable Data Management Plans Hackathon Report. Data Science Journal, 20, 2021, http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-035
• Source code of DAMAP:
  • https://github.com/tuwien-csd/damap-frontend
  • https://github.com/tuwien-csd/damap-backend

Contact
contact@fair-office.at

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The thematic network dedicated to promoting the governance and management of Brazilian agricultural data, the GO FAIR Agro Brazil Network, was officially launched on April 12, 2022 during a virtual event that brought together 130 professionals from the agricultural sciences, information science and information and communication technology linked to research institutions, universities, companies and startups.

The initiative, coordinated by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), University of São Paulo (USP) and Federal University of Pampa (Unipampa), aims to promote strategies and mobilize partnerships to encourage sharing and reuse of data produced within the scope of agricultural production systems and also those arising from research in agricultural sciences, supported by the FAIR principles.

Research and agricultural activities are responsible for the generation of large volumes of data, of different natures, and their integration is increasingly necessary. Therefore, in addition to the launch of the Network, the event’s schedule included a workshop that discussed priority actions for the next biennium, involving data repositories, data access and reuse policies, data management plans, and metadata and interoperability. The results of the workshop will serve as a basis for the formation of working groups that will work in the collective construction of the Network’s action plans.

The launch was attended by representatives of more than 40 public and private institutions. Among them, the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict), the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), the Instituto de Pesquisas Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro (JBRJ), the National Education and Research Network (RNP) , SciELO, the Geological Survey of Brazil (CPRM), the National Supply Company (Conab), the ABC Foundation, the Bunge and PwC companies and over 20 teaching and research institutions, including universities and federal institutes, including two European universities.

The opening of the event was led by the coordinator of the GO FAIR Agro Brazil Network, the deputy head of Research and Development at Embrapa Digital Agriculture Carla Macário. The program also included the participation of the general coordinator of the GO FAIR office in Brazil, Luana Sales, in addition to a lecture by professor Sérgio Serra from UFRRJ and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), who addressed the perspectives and challenges of agribusiness network.

The first step towards the implementation of the Network was taken in November 2021 during the XIII Brazilian Congress of Agroinformatics, with the elaboration of a Manifesto.
Organized by Embrapa, UFRRJ, Unipampa and USP, the launch event had the support of the Brazilian Society of Agroinformatics (SBIAgro), the USP Institute for Advanced Studies (IEA/USP) and the Artificial Intelligence Center (C4AI).

This article was originally published on Embrapa’s website.

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VODAN-Africa Health System is being deployed across 88 health facilities in 8 African countries. The leadership of the VODAN-Africa project decided this in its Tuesday meeting on April 12th, 2022. This is an achievement in alignment with the mission of VODAN-Africa to generate continuous, real-time, high velocity clinical observational patient data from resource-limited communities that have not been well represented in digital health data. The key feature is that the data produced remains in the health facility only. It will not leave the health facility. Since the data is machine-actionable the input of the data only happens once; in the deployable architecture, the data is used for four parallel use cases.

“This is an ethical data infrastructure, fully compliant with the guidelines of FAIR Data, GDPR, and local regulation. I am proud that this international team has created a pandemic early warning infrastructure, we will be able to pick up pandemic trends early, localize them and work with local health authorities to act on the data” said Mirjam van Reisen, chief investigator at Leiden University Medical Centre and Leiden Global, leading a team of African scientists.

Mariam Basajja, Ruduan Plug, and Aliya Aktau from Leiden Advanced Institute for Computer Science (LIACS) and Leiden University Medical Centre brought the overall architecture together. Mekelle University and Ayder Hospital Scientists Samson Amare Yohannes and Getu Tadelle realized the key features of the architecture. Kampala International University (KIU) based scientists Oluwole Olumuyiwa Afolabi and Ezra Mwesigwa realized the dashboard that can be utilized within the facility and across the 88 facilities where VODAN-Africa is now being deployed. Putu Hadi Purnama Jati led the research into the adoption strategy of the innovation to Health Facilities, which sign a Data Use Agreement to ensure data is used in accordance with all regulations.

The VODAN-Africa CEDAR localized system will allow hospitals and clinics to produce Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data and visualize these data collected from Outpatient Departments, Antenatal patients, and COVID related data. The deployment in the facilities will be led by the Chair, Prof Mpezamihigo, VC at KIU and Executive Coordinator, Prof. Francisca Oladipo, and Dr. Reginald Nulagala, leading the Country Coordinators. They are supported by a leadership team.

This system is ready to be installed locally in residence under the regulatory laws of each country and the data produced can be exported/imported into the government’s Health Information Systems such as DHIS2 or Impilo.

The system was designed with standard medical vocabulary that will enable the data stewards to use it seamlessly. The templates are created with respect to the information needs of each health facility. All the data collected are stored in the local clinics and hospitals, while the VODAN-Africa dashboards help the medical experts to visualize data according to their information needs. The dashboard also aggregates data from other health facilities in real-time through the technique of data visiting. The algorithm goes over the internet and visits the data, which remains de-identified, to recompute the aggregate results. The inclusion of the data in a linked data triple store within the facility allows the data to be queried in a dynamic way. The access and control over the data and permissions given for data visiting reside within the health facility, which, together with authorities, decides whether or not the data is visitable for a particular proposition. The system can also allow researchers to run dynamic SPARQL queries through APIs.

Van Reisen states: “This African-led initiative holds amazing potential for science and is a breakthrough for ethical FAIR AI Ready data pipelines.” The deployment will be done across health facilities in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Liberia.

An Overview of VODAN Africa CEDAR Localized System

1. The localized CEDAR system receives one-time data input from an editor that is operated by the data steward. The system converts the data to machine-actionable/machine-readable format that can be queried using Dynamic SPARQL Queries API and stored in a local SQL database.
2. The locally stored data can be visualized in real-time through an internal dashboard by the local clinics/hospitals. The data from various health facilities in different countries are used to create an aggregate dashboard that also provides real-time statistics and visualization. There is an external dashboard that serves as an input to the internal and aggregate dashboard. The external dashboard displays real-time data from the health facilities.
3. The system allows health facilities to set up their internal database, facility information, user/administration privileges, access, and security control.

The central element of the architecture is the localised CEDAR instance, which allowed the local data production and repositing. This was realised by Samson Amara Yohannes, Getu Tadelle and Ruduan Plug. The architecture will be presented and discussed during a conference on Wednesday 20 April 2022, during a visit of Stanford CEDAR lead Prof Marc Musen to Leiden University Medical Centre.

“We are proud to showcase this revolutionary innovation by African scholars and designers, who have worked with all stakeholders to produce this result. Africa science, working together with LUMC and Stanford is showing us the way to overcome fragmentation, but to build cooperation on data science while data is held where it is produced and where it belongs”, stated Van Reisen.

The hybrid conference was organised together with the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Recordings will be made available online.

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On Wednesday 23 March 2022, more than 45 participants, many of them researchers from the health domain, took the opportunity to learn about managing sensitive data.

In the two-hour webinar, speakers from SBA Research, FAIR Office Austria and TU WIEN introduced tools that can be used for data anonymization, privacy-preserving processing, generation of synthetic data, etc. Furthermore, the participants learnt about the WellFort platform that integrates these tools and provides novel means for consent management. The webinar welcomed participants from different research fields.

Topics that were covered

Sensitive data and the FAIR principles
Tomasz Miksa started the webinar by providing an overview of the FAIR principles. The key message of the webinar was that the sensitivity of data is not a showstopper to apply the FAIR principles. The main focus was on the principle “Accessible: A1.2”, where clear access conditions should be specified and made understandable for machines.

Sensitive data analysis
Rudolf Mayer presented general threats of privacy as well as privacy-preserving data analysis methods and how they can be used in practice. He also showed anonymization techniques for privacy preserving data publishing & computation.

Tanja Šarčević gave a live demo of the tool ARX Anonymization Toolkit. She went into detail for the generation/modeling/evaluation and privacy risks for synthetic data and demonstrated a Trusted Research Environment – DataSHIELD. She showed in another demo a project on Opal data storage and how to access it through DataSHIELD functions under R environment.

Legal aspects in data sharing
Gerald Sendera explained the GDPR applications for sensitive data, synthetic data, pseudonymization and anonymization, as well as GDPR privileges for scientific research. He also pointed out the data sharing and access limitations outside the European Union.

Consent Management for personal data processing
Fajar Juang Ekaputra explained how data privacy vocabulary and W3C standardization represent user consent, then he presented OWL2 reasoning & SHACL constraint mechanisms to check compliance of data handling against consent.

Auditability
Laura Waltersdorfer addressed what can be achieved by data audit and introduced an audit analysis process in a privacy-preserving manner.

WellFort Project
Andreas Ekelhart concluded the webinar by presenting an overview of the WellFort project – a recently finished FFG-BRIDGE project that aimed at creating a trusted-platform (a Proof of concept was implemented for this platform) for auditable, privacy-preserving data analysis which provides secure storage for users’ sensitive data. It furthermore aimed at combining data from different companies for analysis while respecting user privacy and consent. Most of the concepts presented in the webinar were included in this project.

Discussion with participants and future research work

There were plenary questions from the audience around DataSHIELD and whether it can be considered as an example of FAIR for sensitive data. DataSHIELD doesn’t have this functionality at the moment as it does not provide any discovery methods or provide metadata about data in the repository, but this might be extended and adapted in the future.

Materials for download

For further reading, and for all those who were not able to attend the webinar, the video recording of the event and the presentation slides are available for download:
• Presentations and video recording
• Recording available on Youtube

Contact

contact@fair-office.at

The post Webinar “FAIR for Sensitive Data”: A Short Recap appeared first on GO FAIR.

Across four sessions in February and March, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and GO FAIR US held the FAIR for US workshop. Designed to gather broad community input to inform directions and priorities for FAIR capacity building and implementation across the US research ecosystem, the invitational meeting welcomed participants from academia, government agencies, and other research organizations. Sessions covered

• Setting the Stage
• International Initiatives to Consider
• Domain Sciences and Community-led Initiatives
• Models of Community-led Activities and Resource Considerations

There was a slate of terrific plenary talks, and a panel that addressed successes and challenges across a variety of science disciplines. Speakers from the international session covered several organizations and projects that are of interest as models or opportunities for new collaboration and partnerships. Susanna-Assunta Sansone, FAIR StRePo IN Coordinator, spoke on a range of FAIR-related activities and presented Elixir; Elena Wössner introduced the National Research Data Infrastructure effort in Germany; and, Erik Flikkenschild presented on efforts at the GO FAIR Foundation to lead organizational change and the VODAN Africa initiative.

While materials are available only to attendees, we have begun work on a scoping report that will be published by summer.

Support for the workshop was provided by SDSC and NSF (award # 2138314).

For more information, please contact Melissa Cragin at SDSC (mcragin@sdsc.edu).

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