Networking data islands

In science, nothing works without data. They are the raw material for theories and insights. However, not all scientists have equal access to the mountain of data growing by the day. This is because the data is distributed in many places – as if on isolated islands, which are out of reach for many. Access is often only available to the institutes or working groups that have collected the valuable raw materials and stored them on their islands.

This is not due to a lack of willingness to share and exchange, but mainly due to the lack of connections between the islands – the lack of pipelines for raw materials, so to speak. “For us researchers, this is a big disadvantage: it prevents us from comparing and merging data. This delays or prevents new findings,” says bioinformatician Prof. Björn Usadel, Director at the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG 4). Sometimes scientists even repeat the same or similar experiments because they cannot access the data from another island or do not know about it at all.

To counteract this, a network of data pipelines is not enough, however, because the collected data must not only be findable and accessible, but also comparable. That is exactly what is often the difficult part: “It starts with the details,” says Torsten Bronger from the Jülich Central Library. The research data manager supports scientists in their work with data: “A doctoral researcher wants to document her experiments. Should she create one file per attempt or several? What data does her measuring device provide? What information does she store? How does she name the files? Which file format does she choose? Does she store the data on a drive or in a database? Such things can be handled very differently by different institutes.” As a consequence, scientists from island A too often cannot do anything with the raw material from island B, let alone discover it in the first place.