Digital Curation Conference Day 1

I can’t actually connect to the Internet during the sessions so have made some notes and edited them later. I suspect this is rather patchy.
Overall impressions – optimistic spirit with some speakers being very adventurous about what we can and should do. I’m not reporting everyone.
…Opening Plenary,  John Wood , Imperial gave an overview of largescale projects all of which were heavily data rich. One message was that data curation should be intimately planned before the project starts. I had the strong feeling that at least half the problems were soleved if you awere a large funded project.
…Astrid Wissenburg (RCUK) – Egaging overview of research council policies. On the one hand  ESRC does not pay unless researchers actually deposit. On the other hand EPSRC has very lax policy (her words). I couldn’t catch all their statement but I asked her afterwards and basically EPSRC says you can archive or not. Their words imply that publication is the end of the process – after that they don’t care what happens to any data (and possibly not before that either).
…Chris Greer (cyberinfrastructrure)  : over 10^^18 bytes were created in 2006.
…Rhys Francis (Australia) . One of the most engaging presentations.  Why support ICT? It will change the world. Systems can make decisions, electronic supply chains. humans cannot keep pace. We do not need people to process information.
Who owns the data, and the copyright = physics says, who cares? If it’s good, copy it. Else discard it. Storage is free. [PMR: let’s try this in chemistry…]
What to do about data is a harder question than how to build experiements
FOUR components to infrastructure. I’ve seen this from OZ before… data, compute, interoperation, access. Must do all 4. –
And he also highlighted the importance of domain knowledge in preference to institutional repositories (I go along with that).
…Tim Hubbard:
Particular snippet: Rfam (RNA family) is now in Wikipedia as primary resource with some enhancement by community annotation. So we are seeing Wikipedia as the first choice of deposition forareas of scholarship