Friday Notes
Jay: some ideas of how DDI can interoperate with other standards, without huge changes.
Alejandra: interesting workshop. Have more concrete outputs and proposals. Solutions are applicable to own work, even if they come from cross domain examples. Has been good to learn about different approaches.
Dan: Enjoyed the workshop. Pleased to find a consensus around the approach. Many people speaking the same language, or willing to spend time understanding different languages to understand the shared problem space. Look at how DDI is looking at the multi-domain space. Considerable advancement on previous meetings in this respect.
Ernie: First time. Has heard about previous events. Sense that he has found his people. High level objectives, to influence science globally; down to the practical matters of how to implement scripts. Will make a Dagstuhl movie in the Woodstock vein.
Luis: good experience. Has found his people. Enjoyed the discussions. Enlightening to see how the bureaucratic and production oriented work of UN Stats fits into the broader discussions around interoperability. Noes also that it is clear that UN Stats cannot do it alone and looks forward to working with this group and others.
Massimo: constructive, interesting experience. Competences are both broad and technical. Have been able to cover all the necessary levels: from the high level to implementation. Challenge is communicating to the high level why certain technical things need to be resourced and done, and communicate the benefits of these at the higher level. Very capable people.
Dan: optimistic. Standards people can be conflict oriented. This group has been very pragmatic. When asked how different standards interrelate, we have lacked the capacity to tell the story. This is why the work on the dummy data set (making plans for Nigel) will be very useful.
Erol: hopes to continue to work on the things discussed during the week. Would be a waste of the week if we do not. As a practitioner, can see the benefits of this work and collaboration.
Steve: has enjoyed coming back. Has learnt more about DDI and about the Sendai indicators. Useful to see the data and to have concrete connections between the data and the abstract technology ideas.
Doug: new experience. Has been very rewarding. Has enjoyed the approach. When was put into the group, felt that with a geosciences background was uncertain what he could bring. Was useful to see how the approaches from the geosciences overlapped with the examples in the case study.
Pier-Luigi: Ideas often go into vapour ware. Feels that outputs from this workshop can go somewhere. Feels like a congress of Vienna moment.
Barbara: lots of different impressions from the week. Impressed by the people here. Got the bigger picture of the indicators and relation to data. Relation to the bigger agenda. Has enjoyed it.
Niklas: enjoyed the workshop and meeting the participants. Takes away a more holistic view of data interoperability and how the small pictures fit into the bigger picture. Good to see so many people from different backgrounds working well together.
Andrew: humbling experience. Felt that background was different to others. Has been inspiring to work with the people here. To see how action can be catalysed from ideas. Resilience Brokers have a number of active projects, will reach out to some of the participants and continue to work with CODATA, build the community of practice with a number of cities. Now in a better position to understand the connections between RBs work and the data dimensions.
Jim: to meet Jay and Arofan. Enjoyed meeting other people too. Appreciated the scope of the meeting and that it was not just a narrow technical meeting. Don't have to understand everything.
Maria-Cristina: still able to operate without sleep. Exciting to be in an environment with people from different fields. Sometimes feels like a lone actor - so exciting to meet people who are excited about these issues. Came from a different field, so knew less about standards etc - so has learnt a lot that will be directly useful. Feels that we have started a roadmap, that is not complete and looking forward to continuing and making sure that it does not fizzle out. Researchers / academic environment can be very competitive so the collegiate approach was very enjoyable.
Larry: Woodstock for data nerds. Teaches data cleaning as a set of ad hoc things. Will work on a more coherent, systematic approach to this.
Steve: most productive in the eight years of being here.
Simon C: had a very good mix. Last year there was a bigger gap between the groups.
Arofan: concrete things that we can do. There are approaches to the problem space which are concrete. We should be working about the real cases. Did we need a facilitator? Hope that people will stay involved.
There will be lot of small collaborations that come out of this workshop.
Achim: reassured that the topic of the workshop and the direction in which we are going is right. Reassured that the format of the workshop is right. A lot of positive energy. Interdisciplinary approach, using metadata stnadards in a more automated way.
Massimo: will communicate the next steps. Will ask for slides on DDI etc. Involved in a number of European projects. Relevant opportunities to get funding. Will engage with CODATA and with experts from the workshop on this.
Pier: need to consider capacity building (incl. training) early
- Joachim Wackerow to provide DDI slide to massimo.migliorini (Unlicensed)
- Simon Hodson to provide CODATA slide to massimo.migliorini (Unlicensed)
- Steven McEachern to provide hello-world slide to massimo.migliorini (Unlicensed)
- Luis Gonzalez to decode undecipherable acronyms from UN system
- Simon Hodson to decode acronyms for CODATA collaborating organizations
- Simon Hodson to talk to danbri (Unlicensed) about Google funding instruments for dev, tackle some sustainability issues (coordinated with datacommons?)
- We need a name for the initiative
What next
Ensure that the outputs are completed.
Make sure that we have a listing of what has been completed.
Working team outputs and plans:
| Topic | What was produced this week | What are the follow-up plans and schedule | |
|---|---|---|---|
| META Deliverables (across groups) | "NHigel" - the hello-world example Revision to the conceptual framework (Ernie's early work during the week) | ||
| 1 | SDG indicators | (1) The Outline of the main "Guidelines" deliverable (2) A ZIP file of the "Glossary" (aligned concepts, terms, and definitions, covering indicators, dis-aggregation "variables", and codelists). Snapshot of indicator compilation, Working documents in this Google Docs folder (3) Technology Alignment draft (in Google docs) - (notional) just a rough statement to feed into the terms of reference of a group to do this work. | |
| 3 | Data collection across a diverse network | A document describing ALPHA++ which will:
Forms a basis for how to build data resources for health. Funding call in December. | |
| 4 | Guidelines around terminologies | What the group will produce and where it will go:
| |
5 | Data harmonisation and cleaning |
|
How do we move these forward?
Virtual meetings. Form groups around each of these activities.