Workshop on "Global Scientific Data Infrastructures: The Findability Challenge"

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The science world contains an unimaginable vast amount of digital data which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly.

In a networked science world one big challenge faced by researchers is findability. By findability we mean ease in locating/discovering data/information/knowledge and data tools/services for specific researcher needs while taking into account relevant aspects of data attributes, tool/service functionality and deployability, context, provenance, researcher profiles and goals, etc. Currently, there is a conceptual shift from search to findability as the Internet search paradigm is characterized by a lack of context, where the search is conducted in an independent way from professional profiles, context, provenance, and work goals.

In the context of a digital science ecosystem discovering data/information/knowledge, tools and services is better served by findability. A findability capability should be of paramount importance for the next generation of global research data infrastructures. Such a capability must be supported by semantic data models, semantically rich metadata models, ontology/logic based languages for specifying data tool/service functionality, personalization and contextualization support, data mining algorithms, ontology/taxonomy management, mapping/matching techniques, etc. The Workshop will address some of the most important topics enabling findability.