Trial for Long-term Preservation and Utilization of Data in Asia
In AAS 2021 VIRTUAL Annual Conference, Ayako Shibutani (University of Tokyo) Chaired the session "P019: Towards Data Sharing, Integration, and Multi-proxy Collaboration in Historical Studies: New Insights and Future Challenges in Japan" on 2021-03-26, and Shoichiro Hara, Shigeo Sugimoto, and Akihiro Kameda made a presentation about RsDA activities.
Abstract
Humanities researchers have generated large volumes of digital data in the course of their work; however, only a part of them are available as databases. Moreover, though these databases are essential research assets, they are not shared well among researchers. We organized a Research small Data Alliance (RsDA) () — a research group of institutions and libraries in Asia for hosting the research community and building information infrastructure to share, preserve and reuse digital research assets, including databases and data files.
The "RsDA Inventory Database" is a part of the information infrastructure to organize metadata about digital research assets to make them easily discoverable. It is collections of metadata to describe the contents of a "website", which is an entrance for a user to use a particular database or data file registered to the inventory database. We have held RsDA workshops to define terms and their meanings of the inventory metadata (such as "title", "subject", "contributor", "description", and "source"), their description rules, and collecting process of metadata. There are some worldwide inventory databases, such as re3data. We will forward RsDA inventory information to it in the future. Google Dataset Search is a collection of information from each website by reading embedded JSON-LD written in schema.org vocabularies. We will generate JSON-LD inventory information to strengthen the reusability of RsDA inventory information.
This paper will report the RsDA activities, including the information infrastructure, the RsDA Inventory Database, and our approach to facilitating research data asset preservation, usage, and sharing in Asia.