The Creative Law Society and CIPPIC hosted a Creative Commons Salon on the topic of Open Data.  I was invited to represent the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre and speak about research data.

Abstract:

Most university based research is publicly funded and researchers use government data in their work, the data derived from the research of others, and also produce data as part of the research process.  The Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC) at Carleton University does this and also adheres to the principle that publicly funded research results should be created in such a way that they can be re-disseminated back to the public.  I will therefore discuss how the GCRC collaboratively collects, uses, maps and re-disseminates its data and will highlight some of the open data issues it encounters while doing so.  Also, it will be argued that even though the GCRC adheres to access principles, a lack of a national digital data archive and data preservation and management support from granting councils impedes the GCRC and others from sharing their data more broadly while open data strategies have yet to take research data into consideration.  Most notably, Canada does not have a research data archive, preservation policy nor a network of university based data repositories.

I gave a similar talk on March 21s, 2012 the same week at Ottawa University, however the focus in that case was librarians in becoming and faculty at the School of Information Studies.  That presentation is here.