Digitisation of research data is widely increasing all around the world because it needs more and development of enormous digital technologies. Data curation services are starting to offer many libraries. Research data curation is the collective invaluable and reusable information of the researchers. Collected data preservation is more important. The majority of the higher education institutes preserved the research data for their students and researchers. It is stored for a long time using various (...) formats. It is called research data preservation. Without proper research data management plan and implementation cannot curate the research data. The aim of the study is to identify the Asian Library and Information Science (LIS) faculties’ experiences in the research data preservation and curation during their research. Data management, curation and preservation all are interlinked. For reuse of the research data; data curation is an essential role. For this research, we adopted a survey method and an online questionnaire was shared with 1400 LIS professionals, belonging to the Asian region but the completed study respondents are 125 university faculties from various Asian countries. The study findings are 76.8 per cent generated statistical data followed by 58.4 per cent textual files. By far, the most preferable data analysis tool is Microsoft Excel 82.4 per cent. Moreover, the result shows that generated data is mostly stored by personal computers and laptop hard disks. This study concludes LIS faculties having adequate skills and knowledge on data curation and preservation even though they are expecting more services from their academic institute …. (shrink)

This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping Data Ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing, and use), algorithms (including AI, artificial agents, machine learning, and robots), and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking, and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data Ethics builds on the foundation provided (...) by Computer and Information Ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the Level of Abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even the data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations — the interactions among hardware, software, and data — rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enables them. And it emphasises the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by Data Science. Because of such complexity, Data Ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of Data Science and its applications within a consistent, holistic, and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics Data Ethics will provide the solutions that can maximise the value of Data Science for our societies, for all of us, and for our environments. (shrink)

The Emotion Ontology is an ontology covering all aspects of emotional and affective mental functioning. It is being developed following the principles of the OBO Foundry and Ontological Realism. This means that in compiling the ontology, we emphasize the importance of the nature of the entities in reality that the ontology is describing. One of the ways in which realism-based ontologies are being successfully used within biomedical science is in the annotation of scientific research results in publicly available databases. Such (...) annotation enables several objectives, including searching, browsing and cross-database data integration. A key benefit conferred by realismbased ontology is that suitably annotated research results are able to be aggregated and compared in a fashion that is based on the underlying reality that the science is studying. This has the potential of increasing the power of statistical analysis and meta-analysis in data-driven science. This aspect has been fruitfully exploited in the investigation of the functions of genes in molecular biology. Cognitive neuroscience uses functional neuroimaging to investigate the brain correlates of areas of mental functioning such as memory, planning and emotion. The use of functional neuroimaging to study affective phenomena such as the emotions is called ‘affective neuroscience’. BrainMap is the largest curated database of coordinates and metadata for studies in cognitive neuroscience, including affective neuroscience (Laird et al., 2005). BrainMap data is already classified and indexed using a terminology for classification, called the ‘Cognitive Paradigm Ontology’ (CogPO), that has been developed to facilitate searching and browsing. However, CogPO has been developed specifically for the BrainMap database, and the data are thus far not annotated to a realism-based ontology which would allow the discovery of interrelationships between research results across different databases on the basis of what the research is about. In this contribution, we describe ongoing work that aims to annotate affective neuroscience data, starting with the BrainMap database, using the Emotion Ontology. We describe our objectives and technical approach to the annotation, and mention some of the challenges. (shrink)

Formal principles governing best practices in classification and definition have for too long been neglected in the construction of biomedical ontologies, in ways which have important negative consequences for data integration and ontology alignment. We argue that the use of such principles in ontology construction can serve as a valuable tool in error-detection and also in supporting reliable manual curation. We argue also that such principles are a prerequisite for the successful application of advanced data integration techniques (...) such as ontology-based multi-database querying, automated ontology alignment and ontology-based text-mining. These theses are illustrated by means of a case study of the Gene Ontology, a project of increasing importance within the field of biomedical data integration. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that (...) the OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology provides terms for and supports annotation of species-specific protein complexes in an ontology framework that relates them both to their components and to species-independent families of complexes. Comprehensive curation of experimentally known forms and annotations thereof is expected to expose discrepancies, differences, and gaps in our knowledge. We have annotated the early events of innate immune signaling mediated by Toll-Like Receptor 3 and 4 complexes in human, mouse, and chicken. The resulting ontology and annotation data (...) set has allowed us to identify species-specific gaps in experimental data and possible functional differences between species, and to employ inferred structural and functional relationships to suggest plausible resolutions of these discrepancies and gaps. (shrink)

In recent years, sequencing technologies have enabled the identification of a wide range of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Unfortunately, annotation and integration of ncRNA data has lagged behind their identification. Given the large quantity of information being obtained in this area, there emerges an urgent need to integrate what is being discovered by a broad range of relevant communities. To this end, the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) is being developed to provide a systematically structured and precisely defined controlled vocabulary for (...) the domain of ncRNAs, thereby facilitating the discovery, curation, analysis, exchange, and reasoning of data about structures of ncRNAs, their molecular and cellular functions, and their impacts upon phenotypes. The goal of NCRO is to serve as a common resource for annotations of diverse research in a way that will significantly enhance integrative and comparative analysis of the myriad resources currently housed in disparate sources. It is our belief that the NCRO ontology can perform an important role in the comprehensive unification of ncRNA biology and, indeed, fill a critical gap in both the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Library and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal. Our initial focus is on the ontological representation of small regulatory ncRNAs, which we see as the first step in providing a resource for the annotation of data about all forms of ncRNAs. (shrink)

Ontologies are being used increasingly to promote the reusability of scientific information by allowing heterogeneous data to be integrated under a common, normalized representation. Definitions play a central role in the use of ontologies both by humans and by computers. Textual definitions allow ontologists and data curators to understand the intended meaning of ontology terms and to use these terms in a consistent fashion across contexts. Logical definitions allow machines to check the integrity of ontologies and reason over (...) data annotated with ontology terms to make inferences that promote knowledge discovery. Therefore, it is important not only to include in ontologies multiple types of definitions in both formal and in natural languages, but also to ensure that these definitions meet good quality standards so they are useful. While tools such as Protégé can assist in creating well-formed logical definitions, producing good definitions in a natural language is still to a large extent a matter of human ingenuity supported at best by just a small number of general principles. For lack of more precise guidelines, definition authors are often left to their own personal devices. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing the ontology community with a set of principles and conventions to assist in definition writing, editing, and validation, by drawing on existing definition writing principles and guidelines in lexicography, terminology, and logic. (shrink)

The development of ontologies for the purposes of data curation is an important element in modern-day data and information sciences. Unfortunately, much of the work on these applied ontologies is associated with a relativist or conceptualist point of view, according to which ontologies represent (for example) the concepts in the minds of human beings. The paper describes a series of problems with such views, and defends an alternative realist interpretation.

Usual narratives among prehistoric archaeologists consider typological approaches as part of a past and outdated episode in the history of research, subsequently replaced by technological, functional, chemical, and cognitive approaches. From a historical and conceptual perspective, this paper addresses several limits of these narratives, which (1) assume a linear, exclusive, and additive conception of scientific change, neglecting the persistence of typological problems; (2) reduce collective developments to personal work (e.g. the “Bordes’” and “Laplace’s” methods in France); and (3) presuppose the (...) coherence and identity of these “methods” over time. It explores the case of the “Structural and analytical typology” method, developed in France, Spain, and Italy from the 1950s to the 2000s by Georges Laplace and his collaborators for lithic implements. This paper (1) provides a detailed historical account of the evolving content of this collective endeavour over five decades; (2) it addresses the epistemological question of what makes the identity and unity of a scientific method, demonstrating that the core component of the “analytical typology” lies in its particular way to represent real-world phenomena through its notation system; and (3) it reveals how this little known but significant episode of advances in the methods and theory of archaeology, contemporary but independent of the “New Archaeology” trend in English-speaking archaeology, was instrumental in the continuation of evolutionary perspectives in France and in the development of quantitative and formal methods in archaeology in southwestern Europe, foreseeing crucial knowledge representation issues raised today by digital methods in archaeology and data curation. (shrink)

The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovation. We believe that ontology applied to engineering (OE) represents a viable strategy (...) for the alignment, reconciliation and integration of diverse and disparate data. The scope of OE includes: consistent capture of knowledge pertaining to the types of entities involved; facilitation of cooperation among diverse group of experts; more effective ongoing curation, and update of manufacturing data; collaborative design and knowledge reuse. As an illustrative case study we propose an ontology focused on the representation of composite materials focusing in particular on the class of Functionally Graded Materials (FGM) in particular. The scope of the ontology is to provide information about the components of such materials, the manufacturing processes involved in creation, and diversity of application ranging from additive manufacturing to restorative dentistry. The ontology is developed using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). (shrink)

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than conclude on this basis that archaeological facts and fictions are indistinguishable, (...) I identify a number of strategies that archaeologists rely on to make discerning use of “legacy” data – archaeological data recovered and curated over for decades, even centuries, often for very different purposes than those that animate contemporary archaeological inquiry. These include source criticism, secondary retrieval, repositioning and recontextualizing these data in ways that can, sometimes radically shift the “facts” associated with them. The construction of critical genealogies of these facts – the travels and transformations of the material, interpretive and narrative facts of archaeology – is a crucial condition for the successful exploitation of these epistemic possibilities. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. (...) Because proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

In previous works, I defined ourselves as informational organisms, or inforgs for short, who forage for, produce, cultivate, curate, process, and consume information (Floridi 2013). Yet, we may also be understood as interfaces, who inhabit and interact with, an environment also made up of data and computational processes. By describing ourselves in such terms, this paper argues that we can better understand several crucial phenomena that characterise our digital age, including marketing and the “marketisation” of political communication. The article (...) concludes by discussing some of the implications for this in political theory. -/- . (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) is designed as a formal and principled Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry ontology for proteins. The components of PRO extend from a classification of proteins on the basis of evolutionary relationships at the homeomorphic level to the representation of the multiple protein forms of a gene, including those resulting from alternative splicing, cleavage and/or posttranslational modifications. Focusing specifically on the TGF-beta signaling proteins, we describe the building, curation, usage and dissemination of PRO. PRO provides a (...) framework for the formal representation of protein classes and protein forms in the OBO Foundry. It is designed to enable data retrieval and integration and machine reasoning at the molecular level of proteins, thereby facilitating cross-species comparisons, pathway analysis, disease modeling and the generation of new hypotheses. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, (...) we break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

The processes of computation and automation that produce digitized objects have displaced the concept of an image once conceived through optical devices such as a photographic plate or a camera mirror that were invented to accommodate the human eye. Computational images exist as information within networks mediated by machines. They are increasingly less about what art history understands as representation or photography considers indexing and more an operational product of data processing. Through genealogical, theoretical, and practice-based investigation, this dissertation (...) project traces a lineage of computation through images from early cybernetics to contemporary machine learning under algorithmic capitalist conditions of political economy. Objects include mundane examples such as smartphone cameras to sublime examples such as the imaging of black holes. It articulates new conditions and forms of perception and surveillance that result from contemporary technological development in computation. The project builds on theorists of computational media such as Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jussi Parikka, Shane Denson, and Alexander Galloway to examine the interplay between perception, computation, and epistemology. Further theoretical contribution builds on the work of Luciana Parisi and Jacques Ranciére’s articulation of aesthetics, and Michel Foucault’s gesture towards a heterotopia. Finally, it draws from Donna Haraway’s metaphors of the cyborg and sympoiesis to frame the capacity of art to transfigure the limitations of digital network culture into new possibilities for being. Here, it curates practices by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Harun Farocki, Morehshin Allahyari, and Pierre Huyghe. (shrink)

In recent years, sequencing technologies have enabled the identification of a wide range of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Unfortunately, annotation and integration of ncRNA data has lagged behind their identification. Given the large quantity of information being obtained in this area, there emerges an urgent need to integrate what is being discovered by a broad range of relevant communities. To this end, the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) is being developed to provide a systematically structured and precisely defined controlled vocabulary for (...) the domain of ncRNAs, thereby facilitating the discovery, curation, analysis, exchange, and reasoning of data about structures of ncRNAs, their molecular and cellular functions, and their impacts upon phenotypes. The goal of NCRO is to serve as a common resource for annotations of diverse research in a way that will significantly enhance integrative and comparative analysis of the myriad resources currently housed in disparate sources. It is our belief that the NCRO ontology can perform an important role in the comprehensive unification of ncRNA biology and, indeed, fill a critical gap in both the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Library and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal. Our initial focus is on the ontological representation of small regulatory ncRNAs, which we see as the first step in providing a resource for the annotation of data about all forms of ncRNAs. The NCRO ontology is free and open to all users. (shrink)

The aim of this collection is to create a curated set of key German source texts from the eighteenth-century life sciences devoted to theories of generation, heredity, and race. The criteria for inclusion stem from our sense that there is an argument to be made for connecting three domains of inquiry that have heretofore remained mostly distinct in both their presentation and scholarly analysis: i) life science debates regarding generation and embryogenesis, ii) emerging philosophical and anthropological theories regarding the nature (...) of racial typology, and iii) the role of empire in supplying the ethnographic materials in use as evidence for the various investigations and theories being proposed. The Key Texts volume thus has three sections. The first section is devoted to selections from theorists working to create an account of the processes guiding generation and embryogenetic development. Given that at the time there were few ways to definitively prove that babies received contributions from both parents in their creation, mixed-race children became increasingly valuable sources of evidence for those insisting on joint inheritance. Although this sets up the second section of the volume—since one can trace a clear facet of racial biometric science out of this original set of enquiries—the bulk of section two is devoted to the many different accounts created at the time to understand and delineate racial differences. The third section is focused on ‘race and empire’ in order to situate the scientific texts of the previous sections in their socio-historical context. By including these pieces, it is our aim to remind readers that scientific curiosity over the nature and origin of racial diversity did not develop in a vacuum but indeed existed in full knowledge of the exploitation and dispossession of human beings. The ‘materials’ for this research program were in many cases either directly taken from black and brown human beings caught up in Europe’s colonial projects or were provided by the data gathered during large-scale voyages of exploration. The material basis of this type of research was rarely reflected upon by any of the theorists in sections one and two of the volume, a fact that has led many historians of science to focus on these theories without attention to the socio-historical context; we are deliberately trying to avoid this and indeed to deepen our own readers’ appreciation of the fact. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/pr) formally defines and describes taxon-specific and taxon-neutral protein-related entities in three major areas: proteins related by evolution; proteins produced from a given gene; and protein-containing complexes. PRO thus serves as a tool for referencing protein entities at any level of specificity. To enhance this ability, and to facilitate the comparison of such entities described in different resources, we developed a standardized representation of proteoforms using UniProtKB as a sequence reference and PSI-MOD as a post-translational modification (...) reference. We illustrate its use in facilitating an alignment between PRO and Reactome protein entities. We also address issues of scalability, describing our first steps into the use of text mining to identify protein-related entities, the large-scale import of proteoform information from expert curated resources, and our ability to dynamically generate PRO terms. Web views for individual terms are now more informative about closely-related terms, including for example an interactive multiple sequence alignment. Finally, we describe recent improvement in semantic utility, with PRO now represented in OWL and as a SPARQL endpoint. These developments will further support the anticipated growth of PRO and facilitate discoverability of and allow aggregation of data relating to protein entities. (shrink)

Chapter 3 of the ongoing publication "Artificial Aesthetics" Book information: Assume you're a designer, an architect, a photographer, a videographer, a curator, an art historian, a musician, a writer, an artist, or any other creative professional or student. Perhaps you're a digital content creator who works across multiple platforms. Alternatively, you could be an art historian, curator, or museum professional. -/- You may be wondering how AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. Our book (...) offers intellectual tools to help us better see the future of creative fields. These tools come from philosophy of art, experimental psychology, media theory, digital culture studies and data science. The book is the first to combine these different perspectives together. -/- We started the work on the book in summer 2019, exchanging numerous messages, commenting on each other ideas, and sharing drafts of sections. The final book is a result of this process. Although each chapter is written by one author, it reflects the discussions we had over 27 months. (shrink)

Chapter 1 of the ongoing online publication "Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design", Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli -/- Book information: Assume you're a designer, an architect, a photographer, a videographer, a curator, an art historian, a musician, a writer, an artist, or any other creative professional or student. Perhaps you're a digital content creator who works across multiple platforms. Alternatively, you could be an art historian, curator, or museum professional. -/- You may be wondering how (...) AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. Our book offers intellectual tools to help us better see the future of creative fields. These tools come from philosophy of art, experimental psychology, media theory, digital culture studies and data science. The book is the first to combine these different perspectives together. -/- We started the work on the book in summer 2019, exchanging numerous messages, commenting on each other ideas, and sharing drafts of sections. The final book is a result of this process. Although each chapter is written by one author, it reflects the discussions we had over 27 months. (shrink)

Researchers and activists are increasingly drawing on the practice of collecting, archiving, and sharing stories to advance social justice, especially given the low cost and accessibility of digital technologies. These practices differ in their aims and scope yet they share a common conviction: that digital storytelling is empowering especially when curating and disseminating life stories of marginalized groups. In this paper, I question this conviction and ask: is it possible that such practices take away from what is found to be (...) meaningful and worthwhile in practices of storytelling and listening, and, if so, how? To answer this question, I argue for a renewed attentiveness to story scenes, highlighting the inherently relational nature of storytelling and listening. I examine this relational nature through a fictional account that exemplifies storied encounters and demonstrates the ethical issues they entail through three themes—reciprocity, responsiveness, and communion—borne out of the plurality of philosophical positions on what it means to relate to another. I explain each of these themes as a starting point for thinking through how digital storytelling may be just, with implications for participatory methods in science and technology studies, design studies, and human-computer interaction inclusive of participatory design, co-design, ethnographic research, and participatory action research. (shrink)

Fixing the problem won’t be easy, but humans’ sharpened focus on an emerging philosophy of data might give us some clue about where we will be heading for.

I propose to open a discussion on a realist philosophy of curation. To do so, I plot premises that will move towards such a philosophy. While I am neither introducing a new ontology nor contributing to metaphysics, I deal with metaphysical and ontological issues as these engage in the philosophy of curation and the philosophy of museums. In particular, I start with a museological or curatorial realism towards a discussion on meeting curation with the broadness of reality. (...) There are three core premises. First, while reality is ontologically mind-independent, it is anti-realist for reality to be curation-dependent. Second, curation has to be folded (contrary to Deleuze’s use of dynamic folding qua ‘an origami cosmos’) to address the anti-realist connotations of curation. To do this, I methodologically introduce the fold and state two-fold, three-fold, fourfold, and fifth-fold semantics of curation. While curatorial realism can be argued in a fourfold curation, the third premise is that the realist aspect lies in the fifth-folding of curation to match the extensivity of reality. This paper will attempt to introduce the philosophy of museums and the philosophy of curation with a bent on the realism/anti-realism debate. It will expose the inherit anti-realism of curation, and survey the need for objects in metaphysics and within contemporary forms of realism. (shrink)

This is a philosophical review of the exhibition dedicated to Literature – Art titled Mukhaputa (Cover page) held on occasion of the Manipal International Literature and Arts Platform 2017 in Manipal, India. The curatorial strategy of the exhibition explores the intersectional relationships between literature and visual arts at large. The context of this critical review is the recent past of modern literature journals in print that encouraged artists and illustrators to converse with literature and in turn poets and authors to (...) be artists in their own right. Through a reflection on the nature of new forms of art works submitted by various artists to the exhibition, the review situates new methods of interdisciplinary curating which is highly contingent and speculative. Curation, thus, demands a new reading in terms of its role in interdisciplinary creative practice. (shrink)

Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellis’s (2012) statement that, “the scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour,” they are worth implementing. More importantly, they are feasible to work (...) on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood (...) class='Hi'>data collection technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

In this essay, I present an alternative philosophical approach to meta-curating. While the debate surrounding the meta-curating of content often centers around technology like post-digital art, I prefer to take a broader perspective and examine its ontological implications. I consider the realist or anti-realist assumptions of meta-curating through Jean Baudrillard’s concept of seduction and Giorgio Agamben’s idea of spectrality. Both simulacrum and spectrality tend to support an anti-realist approach to meta-curating where the value of the object is made fragile when (...) constantly predetermined by a superficially seductive or spectrally floating context. Against meta-curating as anti-realist, I argue that meta-curation is realist. As a case, the seductive and the spectral in Zaha Hadid’s Morpheus in Macao demonstrate that meta-curating does not completely disregard, but rather raises the question of how to establish an antifragile realism prompted by an architectural object. (shrink)

Between 2006 and 2011, humanity accumulated 1,600 EB of data. As a result of this growth, there is now more data produced than available storage. This article explores the problem of “Big Data,” arguing for an epistemological approach as a possible solution to this ever-increasing challenge.

We critically engage two traditional views of scientific data and outline a novel philosophical view that we call the pragmatic-representational view of data. On the PR view, data are representations that are the product of a process of inquiry, and they should be evaluated in terms of their adequacy or fitness for particular purposes. Some important implications of the PR view for data assessment, related to misrepresentation, context-sensitivity, and complementary use, are highlighted. The PR view provides (...) insight into the common but little-discussed practices of iteratively reusing and repurposing data, which result in many datasets’ having a phylogeny—an origin and complex evolutionary history—that is relevant to their evaluation and future use. We relate these insights to the open-data and data-rescue movements, and highlight several future avenues of research that build on the PR view of data. (shrink)

While the term “reactivity” has come to be associated with specific phenomena in the social sciences, having to do with subjects’ awareness of being studied, this paper takes a broader stance on this concept. I argue that reactivity is a ubiquitous feature of the psychological subject matter and that this fact is a precondition of experimental research, while also posing potential problems for the experimenter. The latter are connected to the worry about distorted data and experimental artifacts. But what (...) are experimental artifacts and what is the most productive way of dealing with them? In this paper, I approach these questions by exploring the ways in which experimenters in psychology simultaneously exploit and suppress the reactivity of their subject matter in order to produce experimental data that speak to the question or subject matter at hand. Highlighting the artificiality of experimental data, I raise the question of what distinguishes a genuine experimental result from an experimental artifact. My analysis construes experimental results as the outcomes of inferences from the data that take material background assumptions as auxiliary premises. Artifacts occur when one or more of these background assumptions are false, such that the data do not reliably serve the purposes they were generated for. I conclude by laying out the ways in which my analysis of data quality is relevant to, and informed by, recent debates about the replicability of experimental results. (shrink)

Recently, it has been argued that the use of Big Data transforms the sciences, making data-driven research possible and studying causality redundant. In this paper, I focus on the claim on causal knowledge by examining the Big Data project EXPOsOMICS, whose research is funded by the European Commission and considered capable of improving our understanding of the relation between exposure and disease. While EXPOsOMICS may seem the perfect exemplification of the data-driven view, I show how causal (...) knowledge is necessary for the project, both as a source for handling complexity and as an output for meeting the project’s goals. Consequently, I argue that data-driven claims about causality are fundamentally flawed and causal knowledge should be considered a necessary aspect of Big Data science. In addition, I present the consequences of this result on other data-driven claims, concerning the role of theoretical considerations. I argue that the importance of causal knowledge and other kinds of theoretical engagement in EXPOsOMICS undermine theory-free accounts and suggest alternative ways of framing science based on Big Data. (shrink)

Big Data must be processed with advanced collection and analysis tools, based on predetermined algorithms, in order to obtain relevant information. Algorithms must also take into account invisible aspects for direct perceptions. Big Data issues is multi-layered. A distributed parallel architecture distributes data on multiple servers (parallel execution environments) thus dramatically improving data processing speeds. Big Data provides an infrastructure that allows for highlighting uncertainties, performance, and availability of components. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12784.00004 .

Data mining possess a significant threat to ethics, privacy, and legality, especially when we consider the fact that data mining makes it difficult for an individual or consumer (in the case of a company) to control accessibility and usage of his data. Individuals should be able to control how his/ her data in the data warehouse is being access and utilize while at the same time providing enabling environment which enforces legality, privacy and ethicality on (...) data scientists, or data engineer during data mining process. This paper review issues of legality, privacy, and ethicality in data mining, review processes of Data mining, and also proposes solution to current ethical and privacy issue in data mining. It introduces a new method which enforces data mining without infringing on the privacy of individual or consumer whose data are being used. The sole aim of this paper is to propose a new method of mining data which restricts scientists within the constraints of legality, privacy, and ethicality. (shrink)

Data subject rights provide data controllers with obligations that can help with transparency, giving data subjects some control over their personal data. To date, a growing number of researchers have used these data subject rights as a methodology for data collection in research studies. No one, however, has gathered and analysed different academic research studies that use data subject rights as a methodology for data collection. To this end, we conducted a systematic (...) literature review that searched, compiled, and analysed 32 academic studies that use data subject rights as a data collection method. We find that the right of access is the most commonly-used data subject right by researchers, most studies are interested in measuring data subject rights compliance, and that a variety of difficulties exist in conducting research studies with data subject rights. We conclude that researchers should explore other data subject rights for alternative purposes, ease the process of exercising data subject rights, and improve the scalability of these studies. (shrink)

Big Data has the potential to enable unprecedentedly rigorous quantitative modeling of complex human social relationships and social structures. When such models are extended to nonhuman domains, they can undermine anthropocentric assumptions about the extent to which these relationships and structures are specifically human. Discoveries of relevant commonalities with nonhumans may not make us less human, but they promise to challenge fundamental views of what it is to be human.

This research presents a novel and efficient public key cryptosystem known as the Enhanced Schmidt Samoa (ESS) cryptosystem, proposed to safeguard the data of a single owner in cloud computing environments. Data storage is a one-time process in the cloud, while data retrieval is a frequent operation. Experimental results demonstrate that the ESS cryptosystem offers robust data confidentiality in the cloud, surpassing the security provided by traditional cryptosystems. The research also introduces a secure cloud framework designed (...) to accommodate both individuals and organizations accessing applications and data in the cloud. While individual users may generate and share data, organizations often involve multiple users in data sharing to support their business processes. In these scenarios, multi-user data ownership and access management become critical, requiring secure sharing of cryptographic keys among the authorized users. To address these issues and ensure data confidentiality in multi-user cloud environments, the Improved Secure Cloud Data Storage Framework (ISCDSF) is introduced. This research not only enhances data security but also provides a comprehensive framework for secure data sharing in the cloud, catering to the needs of both individual users and organizations. (shrink)

The first few years of the 21st century were characterised by a progressive loss of privacy. Two phenomena converged to give rise to the data economy: the realisation that data trails from users interacting with technology could be used to develop personalised advertising, and a concern for security that led authorities to use such personal data for the purposes of intelligence and policing. In contrast to the early days of the data economy and internet surveillance, the (...) last few years have witnessed a rising concern for privacy. As bad data practices have come to light, citizens are starting to understand the real cost of using online digital technologies. Two events stamped 2018 as a landmark year for privacy: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The former showed the extent to which personal data has been shared without data subjects’ knowledge and consent and many times for unacceptable purposes, such as swaying elections. The latter inaugurated the beginning of robust data protection regulation in the digital age. Getting privacy right is one of the biggest challenges of this new decade of the 21st century. The past year has shown that there is still much work to be done on privacy to tame the darkest aspects of the data economy. As data scandals continue to emerge, questions abound as to how to interpret and enforce regulation, how to design new and better laws, how to complement regulation with better ethics, and how to find technical solutions to data problems. The aim of the research project Data, Privacy, and the Individual is to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics of privacy and of differential privacy. The outcomes of the project are seven research papers on privacy, a survey, and this final report, which summarises each research paper, and goes on to offer a set of reflections and recommendations to implement best practices regarding privacy. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition. There was a healthy respect for the mind-body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domains were taken seriously. Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James. Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspired "fear of the mental", this development has been (...) down-played in historical work on early analytic philosophy. Such neglect assumes that the "linguistic turn" is a proper and permanent effect of twentieth-century philosophy, an assumption that distorts early analytic historiography, and begs a substantive philosophical question about thought and cognition. (shrink)

Data is very important in any research experiment because it occupies a central place in making decisions based on findings resulting from the analysis of such data. Given its central role, it follows that such an important asset as data, deserve effective management in order to protect the integrity and provide an opportunity for effective problem-solving. The main thrust of this paper was to examine data management practices that should be adopted by scholars in maintaining the (...) quality of their research data. In achieving this, various concepts related to this paper were clarified. Various data management practices were also discussed beginning from data generation to data shredding. Based on the underlying observations from the light of the discussions made in this paper, it was recommended among others that: tertiary institutions in every part of the world should endeavour to establish a data management unit that will be saddled with the primary duty of formulating research data management policies, and the hosting of research data; every Journal should as a matter of compulsion, require the submission of data set corresponding to empirical papers submitted by authors and scholars. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals decide wisely about personalized medicine, treatment plans, and resource allocation by utilizing big data analytics and machine learning. To guarantee that algorithmic recommendations are impartial and fair, however, ethical issues relating to prejudice and data privacy must be taken into account. Big data analytics and machine learning have a great potential to disrupt healthcare, and as these technologies continue to evolve, new opportunities to reform healthcare and enhance patient outcomes may arise. In order to investigate (...) the patient’s outcomes with empirical evidence, this research was conducted using an online survey to incorporate healthcare professionals, patient’s reviews, and clinical staff. The data were analyzed using SmartPLS 4.0 to predict the structural model. The findings revealed a direct impact as positive influence of using machine learning on healthcare performance and patient outcomes through big data analytics. Moreover, it is evident that this can lead to personalized treatment plans, early interventions, and improved patient outcomes. Additionally, big data analytics can help healthcare providers optimize resource allocation, improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs. The impact of big data analytics on patient outcome and healthcare performance is expected to continue to grow, making it an important area for investment and research. (shrink)

This paper addresses a relatively new mode of ecological research: data synthesis studies. Data synthesis studies involve reusing data to create a general model as well as a reusable, aggregated dataset. Using a case from movement ecology, I analyse the trade-offs and strategies involved in data synthesis. Like theoretical ecological modelling, I find that synthesis studies involve a modelling trade-off between generality, precision and realism; they deal with this trade-off by adopting a pragmatic kludging strategy. I (...) also identify an additional trade-off, the synthesis trade-off, between making data easy to synthesise for a particular project, on the one hand, and facilitating data reuse for other projects, on the other. In response to this synthesis trade-off, researchers create flexible datasets that are relatively easy to use for particular projects and can be adjusted to suit some other purposes. The flexibility compromise is also found in broader open data efforts, making it a significant element in the future of data-intensive ecology. (shrink)

Surveillance studies scholars and privacy scholars have each developed sophisticated, important critiques of the existing data-driven order. But too few scholars in either tradition have put forward alternative substantive conceptions of a good digital society. This, I argue, is a crucial omission. Unless we construct new “sociotechnical imaginaries,” new understandings of the goals and aspirations digital technologies should aim to achieve, the most surveillance studies and privacy scholars can hope to accomplish is a less unjust version of the technology (...) industry’s own vision for the future. (shrink)

Biodiversity science is in a pivotal period when diverse groups of actors—including researchers, businesses, national governments, and Indigenous Peoples—are negotiating wide-ranging norms for governing and managing biodiversity data in digital repositories. These repositories, often called biodiversity data portals, are a type of organization for which governance can address or perpetuate the colonial history of biodiversity science and current inequities. Researchers and Indigenous Peoples are developing and implementing new strategies to examine and change assumptions about which agents should count (...) as salient participants in scientific projects, especially in projects that build and manage large digital data portals. Two notable efforts are the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective benefit, Authority, Responsibility, Ethics) Principles for scientific data management and governance. To characterize how these principles influence the governance of biodiversity data portals, we develop an account of fit-for-use data that makes explicit its social as well as technical conditions in relation to agents and purposes. The FAIR Principles, already widely adopted by biodiversity researchers, prioritize machine agents and efficient computation, while the CARE Principles prioritize Indigenous Peoples and their data sovereignty. Both illustrate the potency of an emerging general strategy by which groups of actors craft and implement governance principles for data fitness-of-use to change assumptions about who are salient participants in data science. (shrink)

This paper presents an ethical framework designed to support the development of critical data literacy for research methods courses and data training programmes in higher education. The framework we present draws upon our reviews of literature, course syllabi and existing frameworks on data ethics. For this research we reviewed 250 research methods syllabi from across the disciplines, as well as 80 syllabi from data science programmes to understand how or if data ethics was taught. We (...) also reviewed 12 data ethics frameworks drawn from different sectors. Finally, we reviewed an extensive and diverse body of literature about data practices, research ethics, data ethics and critical data literacy, in order to develop a transversal model that can be adopted across higher education. To promote and support ethical approaches to the collection and use of data, ethics training must go beyond securing informed consent to enable a critical understanding of the techno-centric environment and the intersecting hierarchies of power embedded in technology and data. By fostering ethics as a method, educators can enable research that protects vulnerable groups and empower communities. (shrink)

This post is to inform you about the publishing of an online-first version of our article titled “Critical remarks on current practices of data article publishing: issues, challenges, and recommendations”. The manuscript has gone through approximately 18 months of preparation and peer review to appear in the journal Data Science and Informetrics (DSI), finally.