Data, infrastructure and interoperability:Highlights from social informatics
Florence MillerandPostdoctoral Researcher
&
Karen S. BakerPalmer LTER Information Manager
Comparative Interoperability ProjectInteroperability.ucsd.edu
Social and organizational comparison of 3 scientific cyberinfrastructure(CI) projects with different interoperability strategies:
CI Project for thegeo-sciences
Ontologies
Federated CI directedtoward ecological
sciences
Metadata Standard
Informationinfrastructure for
the ocean sciencesbased at SIO
Metadata‘community-
driven’ approach
Comparative Interoperability Project
Research team:Geoffrey C. Bowker, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara UniversityKaren Baker, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSDFlorence Millerand, LCHC/Science studies, UCSDDavid Ribes, Sociology/Science studies, UCSD
Challenge of CI building:No longer the access to the data but the use of the data via automated queryin a range of different informational settings.
How to share data across distributed organizations and social contexts?
-> Need for an understanding of the organizational and social dimensions ofdata interoperability.
Theoretical and methodological worksfrom research in:
Science and technology studies;Social informatics;Communication;Organizational theory;Information management.
Background:
Social informatics:
Social informatics examines social aspects of computerization – including:
• The roles of information technology in social and organizational change;• The uses of information technologies in social contexts;• The ways that the social organization of information technologies is
influenced by social forces and social practices (1).
E.g.:What king of changes the implementation of a metadata standard requirefor an information manager in an LTER site?How to bring the tacit knowledge into an ontology development process?
Methods:Grounded theory building, making use of ethnographic methods(interviews, document analysis, participant observation)
Theoretical sampling - Cross-case analysis
Use of Nvivo as a qualitative data analysis software.(1) Center for social informatics, Rob Kling, www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/mission.html
2 research activities
1) Community Process Working Group at the annual IM Meeting
Standard adoption ≠ standard enactment
Myth: Technology is objective - it gets used by an organization
In practice:- enacting technology is a bidirectional process
Technology
Technology
Work practice
Work practice
2) Poster: Cognitive division of labor
Particular technical solutions => Particular cognitive division of labor
Ontology
= Conceptual maps of domainknowledge that links the datasets
Ontology Design
Metadata
= Data about data
Metadata Design
Domain scientists‘representatives’
Informationtechnologists
Informationmanagers
Domain scientists(ultimatly?)
Comparative Interoperability Project:
http://interoperability.ucsd.edu
