My final repost today (edited) from the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. It’s a little old, originally posted on the 16th of April, 2013 but I think it definitely deserves to be here on my blog as a record of my activities… So… it’s over.
In the last 2 weeks I’ve given talks in Brussels & Amsterdam. The first one was given during a European Commission (Brussels) working group meeting on Text & Data Mining. There were perhaps only ~30 people in the room for that. The second presentation was given just a few days ago at Beyond The PDF 2 (#btpdf2) in Amsterdam.
Just a quick post. I happened to see @wisealic Tweet about her “new Atira/Pure colleagues” yesterday. I didn’t know what Atira was, but I’d heard of PURE.
Anyone who knows me, knows I’m very passionate on the subject of data sharing in science, and after all the relevant conferences I’ve been to and research I’ve done – I don’t mind saying I’m fairly knowledgeable on the subject too. It’s part of the reason I got this Panton Fellowship that has helped me develop my work and do what I want to do in pursuit of Open Data goals. So when I saw this article come up on my RSS feeds – I thought great!
So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest. But Rod Page kindly alerted to me the fact that I might be using the wrong tool for this investigation.
Why is it so difficult to identify academic publisher PDFs? With published MP3 files of *audio *you get rather good metadata. Take for example an MP3 file I downloaded from Hacker Public Radio available at the bottom of this post.
I’m proud to announce I have a new article over at Palaeontology [Online] Posts at ‘P [O]’ are primarily aimed at public-engagement and since the site was launched back in July 2011, with sponsorship and support from the Palaeontology Association, one post per month has been featured on site. This month [December], I’ve written a rather different type of post for them.
A couple of days ago I posted specifically about the data re-use session. I’m going to use this post to muse about the conference more generally. About SpotOn London 2012 It used to be called Science Online London – an informative, sensible and appropriate name. This year I hear (rumours) that it had to change name to SpotOn because Science AAAS or some other litigious entity was claiming brand identity infringement.
Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate on an extremely timely paper on data sharing and data re-use in phylogenetics, as part of the continuing MIAPA (Minimal Information for a Phylogenetic Analysis) working group project:
