“Prioritizing Digital Data Challenges in Chemistry: Road-mapping Technical Opportunities and Business Cases with the RDA, IUPAC, and the Chemistry Community”
Organizers: Evan Bolton, Stuart Chalk, Bonnie Lawlor, Leah McEwen, Tony Williams
Many social, technical and administrative factors have challenged the open sharing and interoperable exchange of the wealth of chemical data and information for digital and global science. There is a demonstrable need for updated and scaled scientific data management infrastructures related to chemical data, including chemical identification and notation, domain vocabularies and classification schema, and data processing-related metadata and description. Many of these infrastructures exist in semi-analog forms in the nomenclatures, vocabularies, definitions under the auspices of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and other authoritative institutions such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Evolving these scientific standards to function in the digital data research environment will maximize their value to the global community.
The Research Data Alliance (RDA – https://rd-alliance.org) a global community group, is developing generic standards, formats, and best practices (recommendations) that can be used by the chemistry community to enable research data sharing both within chemistry and across the scientific disciplines. Development of data standards for chemistry that are built using RDA outcomes will make chemical data more robust, discoverable, and reusable as science moves into the era of big data and data analytics.
IUPAC brings long-standing responsibility for standards in the chemistry enterprise and a mission to “provide leadership, facilitation, and encouragement of chemistry and promotes the norms, values, standards, and ethics of science and the free exchange of scientific information”. Standards focused on supporting cheminformatics data needs is the new responsibility of the IUPAC Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards, who is co-sponsoring this workshop to ascertain their role in supporting communities internal and external to IUPAC in the coming years.
This collaborative workshop will draw expertise from IUPAC, NIST, the RDA and the chemical information professional community to strategize work plans and formulate a draft road map for cheminformatics data standards. A primary goal will be to spark project groups targeted at specific technical, business and outreach opportunities for improving the usability of chemical data infrastructures.
Dates & Location
14-15 July 2016, EPA Conference Center, Research Triangle Park, NC
Held in conjunction with the meeting of the IUPAC Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards