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A Project On Acquiring And Sharing Data Within The Cmmi Research Community

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Thank you for providing me the opportunity to review this collaborative proposal submitted by Georgia Tech and Northwester U entitled: “Workshop on Acquiring and Sharing Data within the CMMI Research Community,” CMMI - 1652999. This workshop aims at accomplishing goals related to data infrastructure and data access in two of the scientific communities covered by the Division of Civil, Manufacturing and Mechanical Innovation of the NSF’s Directorate for Engineering: those of infrastructure management and innovative materials research. The PIs assert that the meeting will highlight the key issues that must be addressed to realize the full impact and use of “big data” on those research fields. According to the PIs, the workshop will be …show more content…

Addressing two communities with one workshop have the potential of illustrating the inherent challenges of producing guidelines for the “engineering community” as whole, which is so diverse. One important outcome could be to ascertain whether there are opportunities to develop standards that are common across fields, or not. What constitutes data in one field versus another is also an important question that needs to be answered before strategies for curation and storage are developed. For example, for data object identifiers (DOI) to be useful, one needs to develop classifications of data. Are samples included in data? Are the parameters of a simulation part of the “data” that needs to be public? What about the simulation results alone? These are but few of the questions that can only be answered by having this type of focused workshop. Having said that, I am concerned that the PIs have tried to be inclusive of both communities and of data problems of interest to both by mixing the problems and the communities in the proposal narrative instead of clearly distinguishing one from the other and stating how the workshop methodology will help compare and contrast. For example, I am not clear how

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