Researchers Open Repository for ‘Dark Data’

Researchers Open Repository for ‘Dark Data’. Mary Ellen McIntire. Chronicle of Higher Education.  July 22, 2015.
     Researchers working to create a one-stop shop to retain data sets after the papers they were produced for are published. The DataBridge project will attempt to expand the life cycle of so-called dark data by creating an archive for data sets and metadata, and will group them into clusters of information to make relevant data easier to find. They can then be reused, re-purposed, and then be reused by others to further science. A key aspect of the project will be to allow researchers to make connections pull in other data of a similar nature.

The researchers want to also include archives of social-media posts by creating algorithms to sort through tweets for researchers studying the role of social media. This could save people time who may otherwise spend a lot of time cleaning their data reinventing the wheel. The project could serve as a model for libraries at research institutions that are looking to better track data in line with federal requirements and extend researchers’ “trusted network” of colleagues with whom they share data.

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