Report and Strategy on Annotation, Reputation and Data Quality

Abstract

APARSEN is a Network of Excellence that aims to bring together an extremely diverse set of practitioner organisations and researchers in order to bring coherence, cohesion and continuity to research into barriers to the long-term accessibility and usability of data, by exploiting the project partners' diversity by building a long-lived Virtual Centre of Digital Preservation Excellence. The broad topic of annotation, reputation and data quality is an important area in the context of the permanent access to scientific data, not least, because excellent science can build only on high or at least known quality data. Annotation, in general terms, is information added to data and it may be argued that all kinds of metadata are special types of annotation. High quality data is an essential condition of excellent science. There are strong relations between annotation, reputation and data quality: For example, high quality should result in high reputation; high reputation should permit to assume high quality. In the context of preservation this suggests that the data must be annotated concerning quality and reputation, to facilitate appraisal (whether and what to preserve) and re-use (establish reliability). Establishing broad and deep context, detailed critique and amendment through annotation contributes further to establish trust in data, enables their review, being added to or being merged into larger scale datasets and finally, higher level data products being derived from them. It may be argued that all kinds of metadata are just special types of annotations. This report will not much delve into the matter of metadata but concentrate on other kinds of annotation (e.g. annotation for ' comprehension and study', ' interpretation and divulgation', 'cooperation and revision'), outlined in chapter 1.1. The chapters 1.2 and 1.3 on reputation and quality deal with the status of these special topics, hinting at their relation with preservation. Chapter 2 and its corresponding sub-chapters give an overview of perspectives on and some innovative research examples on these three subjects. Chapter 3 presents results of an internal survey to show how partners of the APARSEN network deal with annotation, reputation and data quality today. Finally, based on a critical evaluation of the findings, a research strategy is described in general and for each of the three subjects.