In 2016, the world heard that gravitational waves had been detected and now a third instance is reported.‡ Given that the data associated with these detections are perhaps amongst the most important instances in recent times, I thought I might take a peek at how it was managed.
- The original report in 2016[cite]10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102[/cite] cited (Ref 116) data as DOI: 10.7935/K5MW2F23.
- The second instance[cite]10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.241103[/cite] also cites (Ref 89) a DOI: 10.7935/K5H41PBP
- Today† a third instance was reported[cite]10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.221101[/cite] with data cited (Ref 180) as DOI: 10.7935/K53X84K2
- Sixth instance in 2017[cite]10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161101[/cite], Data (Ref 80) DOI: 10.7935/K5B8566F.
- A complete list of events is available at losc.ligo.org/events/
Each of these datasets is beautifully presented, with interactive components making the data very accessible and indeed FAIR. Recently, guidelines for how to cite data have emerged and the FORCE11 organisation has interpreted them for authors, publishers and journal editors, and repository administrators and it is good that the data for these detections has adhered to these principles. When implemented, it will identify e.g. Refs 116, 89 or 180 in the above articles with attributes that will trigger something called EventData with the objective that it retrieves and exposes the activity that occurs around research data objects and brings to light links between publications and data, citations, software, reuse, documentation, etc. At the moment I presume that these three data citations do not yet trigger any EventData. However, there are plans to for both CrossRef and DataCite to implement search procedures to find such EventData. When this service goes live, I intend to explore its potential; watch this space.
I did one other check on each of the datasets:
- https://data.datacite.org/application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml/10.7935/K5MW2F23
- https://data.datacite.org/application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml/10.7935/K5H41PBP
- https://data.datacite.org/application/vnd.datacite.datacite+xml/10.7935/K53X84K2
These download the metadata associated with each dataset. Ideally this could contain a host of information about the data and in particular its creators (i.e. the ORCID of each of the many authors describing how the data was acquired and interpreted). I show just the last as an example in full (the others are similar). Its pretty minimal.
Now there is an area that this otherwise magnificent example of open data sharing could improve upon. In a forthcoming post, I will show how rich metadata population of a chemistry dataset can be used to enhance it and also to trigger EventData as noted above.
‡For a famous chemical controversy involving gravitational fields, see here.
Tags: Astronomy, Binary stars, Black holes, famous chemical controversy, General relativity, Gravitational wave, Gravity, Physics, search procedures, Technology/Internet, Wave
I write these blogs without preview and only see the final result when it is published. Perhaps as expected, the enormous list of authors for all three articles is impressive (it is generated from metadata!). Perhaps the solution to such enormously long lists is indeed to ensure that the full list is present in the metadata with all ORCIDs added. This would indeed be more useful than these lists.