Assistant Professor Peter Darch and Research Associate Professor David Dubin participated in the Research Data Alliance (RDA) 9th Plenary Meeting, which was held April 5-7 in Barcelona, Spain.
The RDA was launched in 2013 by the European Commission, the United States Government's National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation with the goal of building the social and technical infrastructure necessary to enable open sharing of data. The RDA community includes more than 5,400 members from 123 countries.
At the plenary meeting, Darch presented his poster, "How Do Researchers Trust Data in New and Emerging Scientific Domains?"
As co-chair of the Research Data Provenance Interest Group, Dubin led the kickoff session for a proposed working group on provenance patterns. The Research Data Provenance Interest Group is concerned with questions of data origins, maintenance of identity through the data lifecycle, and how to account for data modification. The working group will focus on finding, detailing, and recommending best practices for provenance representation and management.
Darch's research interests include citizen science, information infrastructures for science, sociotechnical challenges to scientific data curation, and material politics of scientific collaboration. He is particularly interested in profound changes in the organization and conduct of contemporary scientific research that result from the interaction of technologies. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Oxford.
Dubin's research interests include the foundations of information representation and description, and issues of expression and encoding in documents and digital information resources. He teaches courses on information organization and access, and information modeling.