The inclusion of Semantic Web technologies into the lexicographic ‘Middle High German Conceptual Database’ (MHDBDB) is a challenge for this long-term project. Since the 1970 s the Middle High German Concept Database has aimed to provide an onomasiological dictionary for Middle High German. The latest technological revision dates back to 1992, so there is a growing demand for more contemporary infrastructure and usability. The data models themselves, as well as the linking of data sets with authority files, need (...) to be modernised to ensure compatibility with the Semantic Web. This paper summarises the current discussion on formats and ontologies for online dictionaries with a focus on Middle High German lexicography. (shrink)

This paper presents an approach for legal compliance checking in the Semantic Web which can be effectively applied for applications in the Linked Open Data environment. It is based on modeling deontic norms in terms of ontology classes and ontology property restrictions. It is also shown how this approach can handle norm defeasibility. Such methodology is implemented by decidable fragments of OWL 2, while legal reasoning is carried out by available decidable reasoners. The approach is generalised by (...) presenting patterns for modeling deontic norms and norms compliance checking. (shrink)

Linked data have the capability to open up and share materials, held in libraries, archives and museums, in ways that are restricted by many existing metadata standards. Specifically, LD interlinking can be used to enrich data and to improve data discoverability on the Web through interlinking related resources across datasets and institutions. However, there is currently a notable lack of interlinking across leading LD projects in LAMs, impacting upon the discoverability of their materials. This research (...) describes the Novel Authoritative Interlinking for Semantic Web Cataloguing in Libraries interlinking framework. Unlike existing interlinking frameworks, NAISC-L was designed specifically with the requirements of the LAM domain in mind. The framework was evaluated by Information Professionals, including librarians, archivists and metadata cataloguers, via three user-experiments including a think-aloud test, an online interlink creation test and a field test in a music archive. Across all experiments, participants achieved a high level of interlink accuracy, and usability measures indicated that IPs found NAISC-L to be useful and user-friendly. Overall, NAISC-L was shown to be an effective framework for engaging IPs in the process of LD interlinking, and for facilitating the creation of richer and more authoritative interlinks between LAM resources. NAISC-L supports the linking of related resource across datasets and institutions, thereby enabling richer and more varied search queries, and can thus be used to improve the discoverability of materials held in LAMs. (shrink)

The goal of the paper is to present a Simplified Offensive Language (SOL) Taxonomy, its application and testing in the Second Annotation Campaign conducted between March-May 2023 on four languages: English, Czech, Lithuanian, and Polish to be verified and located in LLOD. Making reference to the previous Offensive Language taxonomic models proposed mostly by the same COST Action Nexus Linguarum WG 4.1.1 team, the number and variety of the categories underwent the definitional revision, and the present typology was tested in (...) the annotation on the publicly available offensive language datasets of each of the four languages. The results of the annotation are presented and as they are contained within the accepted statistical values on the inter-annotator agreement in the SOL categories and their aspects, we propose this taxonomy as a core ontology which represents the encoding of the supported offensive languages and justify its use on new data in terms of a more universal Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) schema. (shrink)

Purpose As data-driven tools increasingly shape our life and tech ethics crises become strikingly frequent, data ethics coursework is urgently needed. The purpose of this study is to map the field of data ethics curricula, tracking relations between courses, instructors, texts and writers, and present a proof-of-concept interactive website for exploring these relations. This method is designed to be used in curricular research and development and provides multiple vantage points on this multidisciplinary field. Design/methodology/approach The authors use (...) data science methods to foster insights about the field of data ethics education and literature. The authors present a semantic, linked open data graph in the Resource Description Framework, along with proof-of-concept analyses and an exploratory website. Its framework is open-source and language-agnostic, providing the seed for future contributions of code, syllabi and resources from the global data ethics community. Findings This method provides a convenient means of exploring an overview of the field of data ethics’ social and textual relations. For educators designing or refining a course, the authors provide a method for curricular introspection and discovery of transdisciplinary curricula. Research limitations/implications The syllabi the authors have collected are self-selected and represent only a subset of the field. Furthermore, this method exclusively represents a course’s assigned literature rather than a holistic view of what courses teach. The authors present a prototype rather than a finished product. Originality/value This curricular survey provides a new way of modeling a field of study, using existing ontologies to organize graph data into a comprehensible overview. This framework may be repurposed to map the institutional knowledge structures of other disciplines, as well. (shrink)

The notion of validity fulfils a crucial role in legal theory. In the emerging Web 3.0, Semantic Web languages, legal ontologies, and normative multi-agent systems are designed to cover new regulatory needs. Conceptual models for complex regulatory systems shape the characteristic features of rules, norms, and principles in different ways. This article outlines one of such multilayered governance models, designed for the CAPER platform, and offers a definition of Semantic Web Regulatory Models . It distinguishes between normative-SWRM and institutional-SWRM. It (...) also compares existing principles in privacy by design, linked open data , legal information institutes , and online dispute resolution . The article concludes by proposing the notion of Relational Law to summarize the ethical dimension of SWRM. Ethics are the only regulatory way to constitute a global space, out of the jurisdictional public domain set by national, international, or transnational law, and opposed to the private one. (shrink)

The increasing availability of large cross-national datasets enables researchers to integrate micro and macro levels of relations between human values and behavior. Particularly interesting are interactions between personal and cultural levels which can demonstrate to what extent a specific behavior is affected by individual values and cultural context. In this study, we aimed to shed light on this issue by analyzing data on basic values and drinking behavior from 21 national representative samples of the European Social Survey (2014). The (...) results of multilevel regressions showed that country-level effects of Openness to Change (vs. Conservation) or Self-Transcendence (vs. Self-Enhancement) were not significantly related to frequency of drinking. As expected, individual-level Openness to Change (vs. Conservation) was consistently positively related to drinking frequency, whereas Self-Transcendence (vs. Self-Enhancement) was not. Contrary to our hypothesis, there was a positive association between personal Self-Transcendence (vs. Self-Enhancement) values and frequency of drinking in countries putting higher importance on extrinsic motivations (i.e., Conservation or Self-Enhancement values), while this link was less positive or even negative in countries valuing intrinsic motivations (i.e., Openness to Change or Self-Transcendence values). Moreover, a marginally significant interaction between individual- and country-level Openness to Change (vs. Conservation) values supported the same counter-intuitive result. These findings challenge the widespread idea that more conservative societies attenuate the link between personal values and behavior. In contrast, self-affirmation and cultural rewards theories, as well as culture-specific value instantiations, may explain these results. This study shows that the value-behavior link differs across cultures, yet in a more complex way than was assumed so far. This opens up new possibilities for research on values and behavior in a cross-cultural context. (shrink)

Data sharing – broadly defined as the exchange of health-related data among multiple controllers and processors – has gained increased relevance in the health sciences over recent years as the need and demand for collaboration has increased. This includes data obtained through healthcare provisions, clinical trials, observational studies, public health surveillance programs, and other data collection methods. The practice of data sharing presents several notable challenges, however. Compliance with a complex and dynamic regulatory framework is (...) essential, with the General Data Protection Regulation being a prominent example in a European context. Recent regulatory developments related to clinical trial transparency, trade secrecy, data access, AI training data, and health data spaces further contribute to the difficulties. Simultaneously, government initiatives often encourage scientists to embrace principles of “open data” and “open innovation.” The variety of regulations in this domain has the potential to impede widespread data sharing and hinder innovation. This edited volume, therefore, compiles comparative case studies authored by leading scholars from diverse disciplines and jurisdictions. The book aims to outline the legal complexities of data sharing. By examining real-world scenarios from diverse disciplines and a global perspective, it explores the normative, policy, and ethical dilemmas that surround data sharing in the health sciences today. Chapter Patient Perspectives on Data Sharing, Chapter Supplementary Measures and Appropriate Safeguards for International Transfers of Health Data after Schrems II are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

Data science skills are rapidly becoming a necessity in modern science. In response to this need, institutions and organizations around the world are developing research data science curricula to teach the programming and computational skills that are needed to build and maintain data infrastructures and maximize the use of available data. To date, however, few of these courses have included an explicit ethics component, and developing such components can be challenging. This paper describes a novel approach (...) to teaching data ethics on short courses developed for the CODATA-RDA Schools for Research Data Science. The ethics content of these schools is centred on the concept of open and responsible science citizenship that draws on virtue ethics to promote ethics of practice. Despite having little formal teaching time, this concept of citizenship is made central to the course by distributing ethics content across technical modules. Ethics instruction consists of a wide range of techniques, including stand-alone lectures, group discussions and mini-exercises linked to technical modules. This multi-level approach enables students to develop an understanding both of “responsible and open science citizenship”, and of how such responsibilities are implemented in daily research practices within their home environment. This approach successfully locates ethics within daily data science practice, and allows students to see how small actions build into larger ethical concerns. This emphasises that ethics are not something “removed from daily research” or the remit of data generators/end users, but rather are a vital concern for all data scientists. (shrink)

The aim of the current research is to investigate the feasibility of identifying offensive language in Lithuanian by utilising the Simplified Offensive Language Taxonomy (SOLT). The key principle behind this taxonomy is its ability to complement existing offensive language ontologies and tagset systems, with the ultimate goal of integrating it into publicly accessible Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) resources. The dataset used in the current study is a publicly available corpus of user-generated comments collected from a Lithuanian (...) portal (Amilevičius et al. 2016). The study identified that offensive language predominantly focuses on collective derogatory language rather than individuals. The most common category of offensive language is related to physical and mental disabilities, followed by ideological offenses, xenophobic and sexist remarks, and less frequent categories like ageism, classism, homophobia, and religious discrimination. These results highlight the diverse range of offensive language online and underscore the need to combat discrimination and promote respectful discourse, particularly concerning marginalised groups. (shrink)

The convergence of increasingly efficient high throughput sequencing technology and ubiquitous Internet use by the public has fueled the proliferation of companies that provide personal genetic information direct-to-consumers. Companies such as 23andme and Navigenics are emblematic of a growing market for PGI that some argue represents a paradigm shift in how the public values this information and incorporates it into how they behave and plan for their futures. This new class of social networking business ventures that market the science of (...) the personal genome illustrates the new trend in collaborative science. In addition to fostering a consumer empowerment movement, it promotes the trend of democratizing information—openly sharing of data with all interested parties, not just the biomedical researcher—for the purposes of pooling data and escalating the innovation process. This target article discusses the need for new approaches to studying DTC genomics using social network analysis to identify the impact of obtaining, sharing, and using PGI. As a locus of biosociality, DTC personal genomics forges social relationships based on beliefs of common genetic susceptibility that links risk, disease, and group identity. Ethical issues related to the reframing of DTC personal genomic consumers as advocates and research subjects and the creation of new social formations around health research may be identified through social network analysis. (shrink)

BackgroundThe public and healthcare workers have a high expectation of animal research which they perceive as necessary to predict the safety and efficacy of drugs before testing in clinical trials. However, the expectation is not always realised and there is evidence that the research often fails to stand up to scientific scrutiny and its 'predictive value' is either weak or absent.DiscussionProblems with the use of animals as models of humans arise from a variety of biases and systemic failures including: 1) (...) bias and poor practice in research methodology and data analysis ; 2) lack of transparency in scientific assessment and regulation of the research; 3) long-term denial of weaknesses in cross-species translation; 4) profit-driven motives overriding patient interests; 5) lack of accountability of expenditure on animal research; 6) reductionist-materialism in science which tends to dictate scientific inquiry and control the direction of funding in biomedical research.SummaryBias in animal research needs to be addressed before medical research and healthcare decision-making can be more evidence-based. Research funding may be misdirected on studying 'disease mechanisms' in animals that cannot be replicated outside tightly controlled laboratory conditions, and without sufficient critical evaluation animal research may divert attention away from avenues of research that hold promise for human health. The potential for harm to patients and trial volunteers from reliance on biased animal data1 requires measures to improve its conduct, regulation and analysis. This article draws attention to a few of the many forms of bias in animal research that have come to light in the last decade and offers a strategy incorporating ten recommendations stated at the end of each section on bias. The proposals need development through open debate and subsequent rigorous implementation so that reviewers may determine the value of animal research to human health. The 10Rs + are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License and therefore may be 'shared, remixed or built on, even commercially, so long as attributed by giving appropriate credit with a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.’. (shrink)

The Digital Humanities project ‘CANTUS NETWORK. Libri ordinarii of the Salzburg metropolitan province’ undertakes research around the liturgy and music of the churches and monasteries of the medieval ecclesiastical province of Salzburg. Key sources are the liturgical ‘prompt books’, called libri ordinarii, which include a short form of more or less the entire rite of a diocese or a monastery. The workflow of the project is set in an environment called GAMS, a humanities research data repository built for long-term (...) storage and presentation of data coming from the humanities. Digital editions of the libri ordinarii of the province were generated with the aim of enabling a comparative analysis of the various different traditions. As a first step, the books were transcribed with strict rule-based tags in Microsoft Word and transformed to TEI using the community’s XSLT stylesheets and a Java-based script. Subsequently, Semantic Web technologies were deployed to foster graph-based search and analysis of the structured data. Possible future work on the topic is facilitated by the dissemination of content levels as Linked Open Data. Further analysis is conducted with the help of Natural Language Processing methods in order to find text similarities and differences between the libri ordinarii. (shrink)

A distinction between different notions of “structure” and “function” is suggested for interpreting the overwhelming amount of data on microbiome structure and function. Sequence data, biochemical agents, interaction networks, taxonomic communities, and their dynamics can be linked to potential or actual biochemical activities, causal roles, and selected effects, respectively. This conceptual clarification has important methodological consequences for how to interpret existing data and approach open questions in contemporary microbiome research practice. In particular, the field will (...) have to start thinking about notions of function more directly. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/j5pq5uGld1k. (shrink)

Nowadays, social media analysis systems are feeding on user contributed data, either for beneficial purposes, such as emergency management, or for user profiling and mass surveillance. Here, we carry out a discussion about the power and pitfalls of public accessibility to social media-based systems, with specific regards to the emergency management application EARS. We investigate whether opening such systems to the population at large would further strengthen the link between communities of volunteer citizens, intelligent systems, and decision makers, thus (...) going in the direction of developing more sustainable and resilient societies. Our analysis highlights fundamental challenges and provides interesting insights into a number of research directions with the aim of developing human-centered social media-based systems. (shrink)

This paper explores the legal and ethical concept of human subject research in order to determine whether genetic research with already available biosamples and data falls within this concept. Although the ethical concept seems to have evolved to recognize research based on data as human research, from a supranational legal perspective this form of research is not considered human subject research. Thus human subject research regulations do not apply and therefore do not invoke the requirement of obtaining consent (...) prior to using an individual’s biosample or genetic data in research. Furthermore, it remains ambiguous in both the legal and ethical realm whether the use of biosamples or genetic data without additional links to the individual would invoke the same safeguards as research involving additional or specific identifiers. Seeing that research based on already available biosamples and genetic data is not governed by rules concerning human subject research, the second part of the paper analyses whether any consent requirements apply for the further use of already available bio‐samples or genetic data in research. Whereas further use of biosamples is subject to considerably lax consent requirements under Article 22 of the Oviedo Convention, under the General Data Protection Regulation further use of genetic data might not be subject to a prior consent requirement at all, unless it is stipulated in national laws. When it comes to clinical trials, however, sponsors will have the possibility under Article 28(2) of Regulation 536/2014 to obtain open consent for further use of data in any kind of future research. (shrink)

Virtual heritage has been explained as virtual reality applied to cultural heritage, but this definition only scratches the surface of the fascinating applications, tools and challenges of this fast-changing interdisciplinary field. This book provides an accessible but concise edited coverage of the main topics, tools and issues in virtual heritage. -/- Leading international scholars have provided chapters to explain current issues in accuracy and precision; challenges in adopting advanced animation techniques; shows how archaeological learning can be developed in Minecraft; they (...) propose mixed reality is conceptual rather than just technical; they explore how useful Linked Open Data can be for art history; explain how accessible photogrammetry can be but also ethical and practical issues for applying at scale; provide insight into how to provide interaction in museums involving the wider public; and describe issues in evaluating virtual heritage projects not often addressed even in scholarly papers. -/- The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in museum studies, digital archaeology, heritage studies, architectural history and modelling, virtual environments. (shrink)

Nearly fifty years after the incorporation of the International Society for Knowledge Organization and the introduction of its formal scientific journal Knowledge Organization, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the domain appeared. The practice of domain analysis for knowledge organization, twenty years after its introduction as a core methodology, has created the largest corpus of theoretical knowledge in the domain analysis of knowledge organization itself. A substantial body of research data, therefore, is available in the corpus of articles and conference papers (...) reporting on the epistemological and ontological pillars of the science of knowledge organization. This paper is a report on the evolution of a formal taxonomy of knowledge organization, which is a product of an exhaustive meta-analysis of the KO domain. Our team compiled the corpus of twenty-nine formal published analyses together with key formative historical documents. We then analyzed the corpus thematically, bibliographically, and using co-word analysis to extract key concepts and the underlying faceted conceptual infrastructure. The taxonomy itself is faceted and is linked where possible to published definitions in the KO literature and as well as to the online ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization. A dynamic project, the taxonomy will be maintained as linked open data and will grow as emergent research contributes new concepts or generates new facets. (shrink)

Positioning technologies, such as GPS are widespread in society but are used only sparingly in behavioural science research, e.g., because processing positioning technology data can be cumbersome. The current work attempts to unlock positioning technology potential for behavioural science studies by developing and testing a research tool to analyse GPS tracks. This tool—psyosphere—is published as open-source software, and aims to extract behaviours from GPSs data that are more germane to behavioural research. Two field experiments were conducted to (...) test application of the research tool. During these experiments, participants played a smuggling game, thereby either smuggling tokens representing illicit material past border guards or not. Results suggested that participants varied widely in variables, such as course and speed variability and distance from team members in response to the presence of border guards. Subsequent analyses showed that some of these GPS-derived behavioural variables could be linked to self-reported mental states, such as fear. Although more work needs to be done, the current study demonstrates that psyosphere may enable researchers to conduct behavioural experiments with positioning technology, outside of a laboratory setting. (shrink)

Worldwide, vulnerable neighbourhoods of large cities are often the scene of collective violent conflicts linked with migration and ethnic minorities’ struggles for social justice. However, urban conflicts of this kind have not taken place in Spanish cities with high immigration rates, even though the country has been deeply affected by two recent socioeconomic crises (2009 and 2020). This article reports findings of a study aimed at understanding what lies behind this apparent social peace. The research methodology was based on (...) an analysis of secondary socio-economic and socio-relational data from the Spanish Institute of Statistics and from key national surveys and reports. Results confirmed that immigrant population living in the country are strongly segregated in the lower strata of the labour and socioeconomic structure and have been disproportionately affected by the crises. However, research findings also pointed to the existence of strong closed support networks where social capital has been effective at palliating members’ disadvantage and unrest. Drawing on the Theory of Rupture Frames, we argue that this is a fragile and unsustainable social peace, rooted in social injustice, and anticipate that unless actively prevented, uncontrolled conflict will eventually emerge in main cities’ neighbourhoods in Spain. (shrink)

Background Psychological practitioners often seek to directly change the form or frequency of clients' maladaptive perfectionist thoughts, because such thoughts predict future depression. Indirect strategies, such as self-compassion interventions, that seek to change clients' relationships to difficult thoughts, rather than trying to change the thoughts directly could be just as effective. This study aimed to investigate whether self-compassion moderated, or weakened, the relationship between high perfectionism and high depression symptoms in both adolescence and adulthood. Methods The present study utilised anonymous (...) self-report questionnaires to assess maladaptive perfectionism, depression, and self-compassion across two samples covering much of the life-span. Questionnaires were administered in a high school setting for the adolescent sample, and advertised through university and widely online to attract a convenience sample of adults. Results Moderation analyses revealed that self-compassion reduced the strength of relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in our adolescent Study 1 and our adult study 2. Limitations Cross-sectional self-reported data restricts the application of causal conclusions and also relies on accurate self-awareness and willingness to respond to questionnaire openly. Conclusions The replication of this finding in two samples and across different age-appropriate measures suggests that self-compassion does moderate the link between perfectionism and depression. Self-compassion interventions may be a useful way to undermine the effects of maladaptive perfectionism, but future experimental or intervention research is needed to fully assess this important possibility. (shrink)

The advent of the Web is one of the defining technological events of the twentieth century, yet its impact on the fundamental questions of philosophy has not yet been explored, much less systematized. The Web, as today implemented on the foundations of the Internet, is broadly construed as the space of all items of interest identified by URIs. Originally a space of linked hypertext documents, today the Web is rapidly evolving as a universal platform for data and computation. (...) Even swifter is the Web‐driven transformation of many previously unquestioned philosophical concepts of privacy, belief, intelligence, cognition, and even embodiment in surprising ways. The ensuing essays in this collection hope to explore the philosophical foundation of the World Wide Web and open the debate on whether or not the changes caused by the Web to technology and society warrant the creation of a philosophy of the Web. (shrink)

Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal. We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate. We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the (...) articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric solar radiation management rather than land-based carbon dioxide removal type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for solar radiation management type technologies more than for land-based carbon dioxide removal ones. The article also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualising tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the article contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a technology. (shrink)

Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellis’s (2012) statement that, “the scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour,” they are worth implementing. More importantly, they (...) are feasible to work on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source. (shrink)

A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society’s trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases, well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data have turned out to have weak technical foundations.

Purpose – Does copyright protection reduce or foster intellectual and industrial creation? Based on a case study from history of science, the aim is to provide more controversial evidence to this debate. Design/methodology/approach – The investigation used primary and secondary sources from the history of science and made the link to the actual debate on copyright, piracy and scientific communication. Findings – The paper describes how Elzevier, through non-authorized exploitation of a new product and without consideration of the editor's legitimate (...) interests, in a context of missing copyright protection, largely contributed to the dissemination of the French Journal de Savants and its content, and finally to the success of scientific journals. Obviously, rights infringement can not only promote the interest and objective of the rights holder but also and above all contribute to the emergence and development of new forms of scientific life. Sometimes, when barriers to communication and debate are too strong, tolerated and calculated infringement may be an option to move the lines/change the situation. Research limitations/implications – In the post-Gutenberg galaxy, made up of open access, common goods and public domain, open data and e-Science, evaluation, innovation, sustainability, communication and sharing, copyright is not necessarily the option to develop scientific communication. At least, the authors have to study lessons from academic publishing, copyright protection and piracy very carefully. Originality/value – The paper sheds light on a surprising and not very well-known part of the history of academic publishing. (shrink)

Irreplicability is framed as crisis, blamed on sloppy science motivated by perverse stimuli in research. Structural changes to the organization of science, targeting sloppy science (e.g., open data, pre‐registration), are proposed to prevent irreplicability. While there is an unquestionable link between sloppy science and failures to replicate/reproduce scientific studies, they are currently conflated. This position can be understood as a result of the erosion of the role of theory in science. The history, sociology, and philosophy of science reveal (...) alternative explanations for irreplicability to show it is part of proper, informative and valuable science. Irreplicability need not equate research waste. Sloppy science is the problem, also when results do replicate. Hence, the solution should focus on opposing sloppy research. (shrink)

Digital intellectual history should concern itself with the history of words or constellations of words rather than the history of 'concepts'. In fact, this is what digital historians of concepts are already doing. We should begin to acknowledge this explicitly.

This paper argues for subsuming the question of open data within a larger question of information justice, with the immediate aim being to establish the need for rather than the principles of such a theory. I show that there are several problems of justice that emerge as a consequence of opening data to full public accessibility, and are generally a consequence of the failure of the open data movement to understand the constructed nature of (...) class='Hi'>data. I examine three such problems: the embedding of social privilege in datasets as the data is constructed, the differential capabilities of data users, and the norms that data systems impose through their function as disciplinary systems. In each case I show that open data has the quite real potential to exacerbate rather than alleviate injustices. This necessitates a theory of information justice. I briefly suggest two complementary directions in which such a theory might be developed: one defining a set of moral inquiries that can be used to evaluate the justness of data practices, and another exploring the practices and structures that a social movement promoting information justice might pursue. (shrink)

This paper discusses ways in which empirical research investigating sexual networks can further understanding of the transmission of HIV in London, using information from a 24-month period of participant observation and 53 open-ended, in-depth interviews with eighteen men and one woman who have direct and indirect sexual links with each other. These interviews enabled the identification of a wider sexual network between 154 participants and contacts during the year August 1994-July 1995. The linked network data help to (...) identify pathways of transmission between individuals who are HIV+ and those who are HIVolderyounger’ men, and with male prostitutes. There appears to be considerable on-going transmission of HIV in London. The majority of participants reported having had unprotected anal and/or vaginal sex within a variety of relationships. The implications of these findings for policies designed to prevent the transmission of HIV are discussed. (shrink)

Sharing of experimental clinical research data usually happens between individuals or research groups rather than via public repositories, in part due to the need to protect research participant privacy. This approach to data sharing makes it difficult to connect journal articles with their underlying datasets and is often insufficient for ensuring access to data in the long term. Voluntary data sharing services such as the Yale Open Data Access (YODA) and Clinical Study Data (...) Request (CSDR) projects have increased accessibility to clinical datasets for secondary uses while protecting patient privacy and the legitimacy of secondary analyses but these resources are generally disconnected from journal articles—where researchers typically search for reliable information to inform future research. New scholarly journal and article types dedicated to increasing accessibility of research data have emerged in recent years and, in general, journals are developing stronger links with data repositories. There is a need for increased collaboration between journals, data repositories, researchers, funders, and voluntary data sharing services to increase the visibility and reliability of clinical research. Using the journal Scientific Data as a case study, we propose and show examples of changes to the format and peer-review process for journal articles to more robustly link them to data that are only available on request. We also propose additional features for data repositories to better accommodate non-public clinical datasets, including Data Use Agreements (DUAs). (shrink)

Dans les cinquante dernières années, les progrès de l’informatisation ont renforcé l’accessibilité de la jurisprudence via des bases de données juridiques, maintenant concurrencées par des plates-formes de diffusion du droit sur internet. La loi pour une République numérique du 7 octobre 2016 a prévu la généralisation de la diffusion des décisions des juges du fond au titre du processus d’ open data. Toutefois les obstacles sont nombreux : conceptuels, techniques, matériels. D’abord, un glissement s’est opéré d’une problématique d’anonymisation (...) des décisions juridictionnelles vers celle de leur pseudonymisation. Ensuite, la pseudonymisation pourrait constituer un frein au mouvement d’ open data judiciaire, du fait de la lourdeur technique nécessaire pour la réaliser. Juridiquement, sa mise en œuvre s’avère de surcroît délicate. Le renvoi législatif à la protection de la vie privée doit se combiner avec l’application du droit des données personnelles, au titre duquel il faut limiter le risque de réidentification des justiciables. Enfin, matériellement le curseur de la pseudonymisation est malaisé à placer. Quelles indications convient-il de masquer : celles relatives aux parties, ou plus largement aux personnes citées et professionnels du droit impliqués? (shrink)

The movements by national governments, funding agencies, universities, and research communities toward “open data” face many difficult challenges. In high-level visions of open data, researchers’ data and metadata practices are expected to be robust and structured. The integration of the internet into scientific institutions amplifies these expectations. When examined critically, however, the data and metadata practices of scholarly researchers often appear incomplete or deficient. The concepts of “accountability” and “transparency” provide insight in understanding these (...) perceived gaps. Researchers’ primary accountabilities are related to meeting the expectations of research competency, not to external standards of data deposition or metadata creation. Likewise, making data open in a transparent way can involve a significant investment of time and resources with no obvious benefits. This paper uses differing notions of accountability and transparency to conceptualize “open data” as the result of ongoing achievements, not one-time acts. (shrink)

Openness and transparency are becoming hallmarks of responsible data practice in science and governance. Concerns about data falsification, erroneous analysis, and misleading presentation of research results have recently strengthened the call for new procedures that ensure public accountability for data-driven decisions. Though we generally count ourselves in favor of increased transparency in data practice, this Commentary highlights a caveat. We suggest that legislative efforts that invoke the language of data transparency can sometimes function as “Trojan (...) Horses” through which other political goals are pursued. Framing these maneuvers in the language of transparency can be strategic, because approaches that emphasize open access to data carry tremendous appeal, particularly in current political and technological contexts. We illustrate our argument through two examples of pro-transparency policy efforts, one historical and one current: industry-backed “sound science” initiatives in the 1990s, and contemporary legislative efforts to open environmental data to public inspection. Rules that exist mainly to impede science-based policy processes weaponize the concept of data transparency. The discussion illustrates that, much as Big Data itself requires critical assessment, the processes and principles that attend it—like transparency—also carry political valence, and, as such, warrant careful analysis. (shrink)

Data and ideas are the capital of research productivity. Is it ethical to preempt the publication of another researcher’s unpublished data or preliminary analysis, perhaps without citation? The long-established answer is ‘certainly not’—but recent ‘open data’ use suggests otherwise. A research competition was held using data from The Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial. This SPRINT Data Analysis Challenge created a novel environment for using open data as data became open early. (...) This allowed third-party researchers the opportunity to assess some of the trial’s outcomes before trialists. Could this infringe on trialists’ right to analyse their data? Simultaneously, trialists had access to analyses from submissions to the competition that were not formally ‘published’ with a typical author credit or citation. Therefore, trialists had the opportunity to view the competition submissions and published on those ideas first without a typical way to cite the source of that idea. Could this infringe on researchers’ right to be credited for their ideas? This is not intended as a criticism of open data, the SPRINT Data Analysis Challenge, or similar systems/ventures, but is an effort to objectively note what may be remediable flaws in the worthwhile, growing and dynamic uses of open data. We offer preliminary analytics to shed more light and provide fodder for additional discussion. (shrink)

One of the fundamental roles of memory organisations is to safe-keep collections and this includes activities around their preservation and conservation. Conservators produce documentation records of their work to assist future interpretation of objects and to explain decision making for conservation. This documentation may exist as structured data or free text and in both cases they require vocabularies that can be understood widely in the domain. This paper describes a survey of conservation professionals which allowed us to compile the (...) vocabularies used in the domain. It includes an analysis of the vocabularies with key findings: a) the overlapping terms with multiple definitions, b) the partial coverage of the domain which is lacking controlled vocabularies for condition types and treatment techniques and c) the limited formats in which vocabularies are published, making them difficult to use within Linked Data implementations. The paper then describes an approach to improve the vocabulary landscape in conservation by providing guidelines for encoding and aligning vocabularies as well as considering third party platforms for sharing vocabularies in a sustainable way. The paper concludes with a summary of our findings and recommendations. (shrink)

Open science will make science more efficient, reliable, and responsive to societal challenges. The European Commission has sought to advance open science policy from its inception in a holistic and integrated way, covering all aspects of the research cycle from scientific discovery and review to sharing knowledge, publishing, and outreach. We present the steps taken with a forward-looking perspective on the challenges laying ahead, in particular the necessary change of the rewards and incentives system for researchers (for which (...) various actors are co-responsible and which goes beyond the mandate of the European Commission). Finally, we discuss the role of artificial intelligence (AI) within an open science perspective. (shrink)

The European Union is working towards harmonizing legislation across Europe, in order to improve cross-border interchange of legal information. This goal is supported for instance via standards such as the European Law Identifier and the European Case Law Identifier, which provide technical specifications for Web identifiers and suggestions for vocabularies to be used to describe metadata pertaining to legal documents in a machine readable format. Notably, these ECLI and ELI metadata standards adhere to the RDF data format which forms (...) the basis of Linked Data, and therefore have the potential to form a basis for a pan-European legal Knowledge Graph. Unfortunately, to date said specifications have only been partially adopted by EU member states. In this paper we describe a methodology to transform the existing legal information system used in Austria to such a legal knowledge graph covering different steps from modeling national specific aspects, to population, and finally the integration of legal data from other countries through linked data. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by exemplifying practical use cases from legal information search, which are not possible in an automated fashion so far. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly (...) ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

This short commentary reflects on policy making for open data. The articles in this special issue all raise interesting challenges and questions for research policy, broadly defined, including how to stimulate researchers to make data open in the first place, how to reuse data sensibly, and how to ensure data are appropriately stored and made accessible for future users. This commentary reflects on the author’s own experience of taking part in an international policy forum (...) that was tasked with preparing a report about the importance of making research data open. The author describes how she attempted to ensure insights from science and technology studies—made by contributors to this special issue and many others in the field—were incorporated in the final report. She also describes how technologically determinist arguments were invoked to close down discussions about the political dimensions of open access to research data. (shrink)

Opening up as many sources of information as possible is particularly conducive to the development of workable policy plans and to efficient decision-making in a democratic political system. It follows that MPs can greatly benefit from using computerized information systems.As far as the parliamentary activities are concerned, we can distinguish between internal and external information flow. The contents of the parliamentary documents, the procedure for processing them and the information on the parliamentary control are part of the internal information flow. (...) The external information on the other hand refers to the relations between the MPs and the executive and the judiciary branches, supranational and international institutions as well as the library.To date, the House of Representatives has been the only assembly that has set up a computerized information system. The data bases of the House comprise : the parliamentary documents and the state of advancement of all proceedings linked to these documents until the publication of the text in the official state journal. Other databases relate to the parliamentary control : interpellations, motions, oral questions and the entire text of the written parliamentary questions.The record of the House will also be stored in a data base giving references. The library fund has been integrated in the interlibrary network DOBIS-LIBIS. A data base was also designed for the press information, and linked to an image processing system.What has been realized in the House to date must also be feasible for the other parliamentary assemblies. Viewed from that perspective, it seems advisable that data bases be centralized in one parliamentary information DP centre. Access to this centre should be particulary user-friendly and uniform, so much so that all MPs can make maximum use of it.The system set up by the House meets with an ever increasing demand from other possible users. In this context, attention should be drawn to the interconnection of this system with other parliamentary assemblies, the extension of the system to other users in the House ofthe MPs and the external access to the system via the telephone network: direct access for the universities, and for certain public and private institutions and individual MPs, and the BISTEL and/ or VIDEOTEX access.The majority of the public data bases linked to the telephone network can be interrogated via the BISTEL system, hut many interesting applications are not accessible via the telephone network as they function in closed circuits.Opening up data bases by linking them to the telephone network, implies that the problem of cost and privacy be carefully examined. As to privacy, we should reflect on the public or confidential character of the data and its consequences, on safeguarding the information stored in the system and on the evolution ofcommunications technology from the perspective of a continental European communications network. (shrink)

This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open (...) source are identified: First, by regarding data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business. (shrink)