Sharing Scientific Data with Normal People

Mike Higgins brought up a couple of issues to start the discussion: can scientists be incented to open and share their data, and can normal people use it to anything useful? There are barriers to both.

Mike gave databasin.org as an example site that tries to overcome the problems. It lets data providers track data usage: who has made maps with this data? What of? How many times has it been downloaded? This is meant to provide providers with a way to prove to funders that their data is valuable. It also lets providers keep tabs on misguided uses of data: a provider can't prevent a misuse of data, but could comment on it. It lets "normal people" find maps created from data and use those as a starting point instead of having to start with raw data.

Then the discussion turned to more general issues. Two issues arose several times in the conversation. First, a lot of valuable geodata is extremely large (petabyte scale). It's currently fairly intractable to share that data, and it is highly complex, so making it accessible to casual users would be very difficult. The other big issue that came up is authenticity: how can you prove that the data you're downloading is actually what the metadata says it is? (On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.) Cryptographic checksums and so forth were bandied about as a possible technical fix.