Posted by r.silva on 21 February 2019 - 9:43am 

Image by Hagen Langbartels. Available at Flickr.

By Raniere Silva, Community Officer, Software Sustainability Institute.

One of the many opportunities to start a new collaboration during the Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) is the mini-workshops and demo sessions. This year we’ll have presentations about ontology, digital preservation and reproducible research, in addition to the themes of the CW19—interoperability, documentation, training and sustainability. Mini-workshops and demo sessions will take place on either the 1st or 2nd April 2019 at the West Park Teaching Hub, Loughborough University, Loughborough. Here are some of the thought-provoking proposals that we will host.

Ontology

Ontology relates to the definition of the categories, properties and relations. Ontologies are important for interoperability so that users can bridge between datasets and software.  

At CW19, Melodee Beals will demonstrate one of the outputs of the Oceanic Exchanges Research Project: carefully mapped metadata schema of 10 different newspaper repositories. At the end of the session, attendees will have experience on a computational humanities approach to integrating what researchers think a database is saying and what it actually encodes.

Digital Preservation

Looking at photo albums is usually a nostalgic and pleasant activity. Remember that amazing summer holiday, that crazy New Year's Eve party, that first 10k under one hour and other moments of our life is priceless. Now with powerful digital cameras on our smartphones, we take more photos than ever before but we have fewer photo albums on our living room. How do we preserve our legacy to be accessible to future generations?

Daina Bouquin will lead a brief overview of emerging best practices in digital preservation with concrete actions people can take to make their research software and data more open, citable, and persistent to ensure the legacy of their work.

Reproducible Research

Research funders and publishers are beginning to require that publications include access to the underlying data and the analysis code. This is a huge victory for reproducible research advocates but a bigger challenge is in front of us: how do we enable researchers to do it effectively?

Kirstie Whitaker coordinated the creation of "The Turing Way", a handbook to support students, their supervisors, funders and journal editors in ensuring that reproducible data science is "too easy not to do". Kirstie will lead a collaborative review of the content during Collaborations Workshop 2019.

But wait, there’s more

We’ll be running other mini-workshops and demo sessions. You can find all of them on the provisional agenda.

Register on Eventbrite for CW19