David;
I have been doing some asking around and I have been pointed to JISC
as an example of a strong portal with excellent support from data
producers and disseminators. I am also digging around to find the
portal experts in Canada who have made headway in building robust
tools. I think it would be great to broaden decision making beyond
CIO and CTOs and involve some subject matter specialists in the
discussion. I'll keep you posted. What I like about JISC is its
collaborative approach to development, with information users &
producers and the information itself directing product development,
and not the other way around.
It is also wrapped in a national policy which directs infrastructure
and program development to manage the nation's digital assets, which
is what we are sorely lacking at the moment.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx, see about
repositories here -
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/digitalrepositories.aspx,
I am most impressed with these folks, and universities, colleges and
gov scientific institutions are on board. This is built on expertise
in the area of big data, large institutions, data discovery,
dissemination, interoperability and description. They also have a
huge knowledge building component to bring their asset managers into
the fold, and capacity building. The resources they have on this site
are areally quite impressive.
I would love to see this sorta of collaborration in Canada. A list of
datasets in alphabetical order disseminated out of context, in the
absence of a policy, would seem to me, to be a move back in time.
Cheers
t
--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
"Every epoch dreams the one that follows it's the dream form of the
future, not its reality" it is the "wish image of the collective".
Walter Benjamin, between 1927-1940,
(
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/buck-morss.pdf)
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