2016 SciDataCon-China: The Third China Scientific Data Conference

--A Blog post by Guoqing Li (WDS Scientific Committee member)

On 25–26 August of 2016—two weeks before SciDataCon 2016 took place in Denver, USA—the Third China Scientific Data Conference was held in Shanghai, China. As can be understood from its abbreviation of SciDataCon-China, this Chinese-speaking conference is the national-level platform for communication about scientific data; just as SciDataCon, hosted by ICSU’s World Data System (ICSU-WDS) and Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), is at the international level.

2016 SciDataCon-China was co-hosted by Fudan University, which houses the first Data Science Laboratory to be set up in China. Greater than 380 experts, scholars, and students from universities, institutes, companies, and governmental agencies gathered in the Zhangjiang Campus of Fudan University to attend in excess of 20 breakout sessions over the two days. Although the number of participants was slightly fewer than the 400 who attended the Second SciDataCon-China in 2015, oral reports significantly increased to more than 160 from around 100 last time, making it the leading scientific data conference in China.

Different from the Information Sciences approach, SciDataCon-China has kept a domain-oriented emphasis as a primary principle from its beginnings. Breakout sessions mostly served the multidisciplinary community, covering such diverse fields as Materials Science, Astronomy, Space Science, Geography, Ecology, Earth Observation Science, Marine Science, Smart Cities, Precision Medicine, and Agriculture, as well as the management, analysis, and visualization of scientific Big Data.

SciDataCon-China is not only a communication platform for domain scientists and information scientists, but also a dialogue platform for scientific communities and decision-makers. Consecutive sessions on data policy, funding policy, and large-grant programme management were jointly held by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. An important conclusion of the conference was that the opening and sharing of scientific data should be supported mainly through national finances; in particular, because scientific data can help to accelerate the construction of national innovation capacity.

A session by WDS-China has been a regular and popular feature of each SciDataCon-China since its conception. On this occasion, greater than 40 experts from 7 Chinese WDS Members were at the WDS-China session alongside numerous attendees from local data centers. Discussions and reports focused on the topics of the maintenance and future development of Chinese WDS Member Organizations, the sustainability of national scientific data centers, creating a uniform metadata service within WDS-China, the long-term preservation of published data, and so on.

Under the oversight of the WDS Scientific Committee, and supported by the WDS International Programme Office, WDS-China and WDS-Japan are now working together to realize the inaugural WDS Asia-Pacific Symposium: a regional communication platform for scientific data. Thus, there will be a seamless transition of WDS communications from the national, through the regional, to the international level.