What the future holds: Metadata and Document Repositories

Open Access: Tackling health inequalities 25 October 2016

Information in Digital Age

Advantages of digital media Easy to store, 100% lossless preservation, easy to copy

Worldwide access

Realities of digital preservation Less copies than we think

Deterioration of storage media, outdated hardware to read it (tapes, floppy disks, CDROM etc)

Legacy formats – old software can’t run on modern PCs

Threat of the Digital Dark Age

Challenges with access to information Private data repositories exist only as long as funding is provided

Research funded by the public is often available only behind paywalls

Digital divide and barriers to access public interest information

We have solutions to many aspects of information inequality but it requires everyone to participate and change their data management processes

Example: Research Data

80% of researchers will not be able to provide the data 3 years

after completing the research. *

Prof. Dr. Mark Ferguson, Science Foundation Ireland

* we believe that is probably a slight understatement

Pilot: Open Document Repository

The Future of Document Repositories

Technology

LOD (Linked Open Data)

IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System)

Blockchain (technology behind Bitcoin)

Benefits

Shared storage model: no single point of failure, data owned by all parties

Transparency in regards to provenance, modification: not through trust but as a mathematical proof

Participation and engagement: direct collaboration and decision-making

Your Role

Sustainable data management practices

Open by default

Consistent meta-data

FAIR principles

http://ec.europa.eu/research/press/2016/pdf/opendata-infographic_072016.pdf