What happened? Something that has been boiling for a few months has finally been made available on the University of Bologna website. In December, the University worked on a policy document entirely dedicated to research data management. As a compendium of such a policy, the University has just published the guidelines for research data management, created by the University data stewards in collaboration with the Open Science Working Group and the Data Protection Officer. This new document aims to support the academic community through all research data life cycle phases.
What I did. We have just received the news that the work (introduced in a previous w-log) describing our experience using and adapting an existing ontology development methodology, i.e. SAMOD, to create application profiles of given standards, i.e. CIDOC CRM and other related standards, has been accepted at the 23rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2024). The application profile developed, i.e. Cultural Heritage Acquisition and Digitisation – Application Profile (CHAD-AP), reuses 25 classes (out of 145), 28 object properties (out of 247, not counting inverse properties), 5 data properties (out of 26), and 81 individuals (out of 56,670) from the high-level standards considered, thus drastically reducing the number of ontological entities a user should know for understanding the data of the application context in consideration.
What to read. Five researchers involved in the PathOS project have just published a scoping review on existing studies that tried to measure the societal impact of Open Science in different contexts. From this analysis, they have noticed that a specific aspect of Open Science, i.e. Citizen Science, is the primary responsible for societal impact. In addition, they did not find evidence of societal impact from the availability of open methods, open evaluations, and open and FAIR data. The article is available in the Royal Society Open Science journal:
Cole, N. L., Kormann, E., Klebel, T., Apartis, S., & Ross-Hellauer, T. (2024). The societal impact of Open Science: A scoping review. Royal Society Open Science, 11(6), 240286. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240286