CODATA Conference - 2008

CODATA activities in 2008 culminated in the celebration, by 400 participants from all over the world, of its 21st International biennial Conference: Scientific Information for Society – from Today to the Future. The successful event took place in the historic surroundings of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” (NTUU-KPI). It was organized by KPI and CODATA under the Patronage of the President, Cabinet Minister and Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of Ukraine, and in partnership with the National Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine.

The Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) was established in 1966 by the International Council for Science (ICSU). The mission of CODATA is to strengthen international science for the benefit of society by promoting improved scientific and technical data management and use.

Mr. Wataru Iwamoto, Director of the Division of Social Sciences, UNESCO represented Director General of UNESCO, Mr Matsuura, at the event. He conveyed a special message from Mr Matsuura to the participants, emphasizing that “Since its creation in 1945, in the spirit of its Constitution, UNESCO has placed a strong emphasis on supporting equal opportunities for all people, from all walks of life, to access, create and disseminate scientific and technical information”.

Mikhail Zgurovsky led the plenary presentations on Monday 6th October. Mikhail is Rector of the NTUU-KPI, Director of the Institute for Applied System Analysis of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and former Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine. Professor Zgurovsky was followed by Bohdan D. Hawrylyshyn, who was head of the Council of Advisors to the Presidium of the Ukrainian Parliament for seven years, was a member of the American-Ukrainian advisory board, and an advisor to the first President of Ukraine. Bohdan Hawrylyshyn is now a board member of the World Academy of Art and Sciences and a member of the executive committee of the Swiss International Policy Forum.

He also facilitated the establishment of the International Centre for Policy Studies and until 2006 was the head of its Supervisory Board. Mr Iwamoto, in his plenary presentation, described many of the initiatives in which UNESCO is playing a part to promote the information society. These include the promotion of open access or differential pricing for access to scientific information; the development of metadata to facilitate long-term archiving; the promotion of evidence-based decision making in national policies; and the recruitment of young scientists and other workers in these tasks.

Robert Jones, CERN, and Project Director of the European Commission financed EGEE project, kicked off the plenary presentations on Tuesday 7th October. This project supports the need for high-quality technical structures to support the management and analysis of large amounts of data. The ultimate goal of EGEE is to provide a long-term sustainable Grid infrastructure throughout Europe and collaborating partners. This talk was followed by a very engaging presentation by Carole Goble. She co-leads the Information Management Group (http://img.cs.man.ac.uk) and is the founding chair of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute-UK (http://www.omii.ac.uk), an institute of software engineers for hardening and supporting the outcomes of the UK's e-Science programme. She is one of the leaders of the UK's e-Science activity.

The plenary presentations were followed by multiple parallel sessions, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the conference. A few examples of the session topics will illustrate this: Information Society, global climate change, Grid infrastructure, geophysical data systems and analysis, biodiversity, scientific capacity building, repositories for scientific data, materials: data exchange, nanotechnology, natural disasters and risk, e-science collaboration, International Polar Year, biological and genetics data. The full programme can be reviewed on the CODATA web site http://www.codata.org.

While the last conference in Beijing focused on the maturity of CODATA after 40 years of promoting and representing international data science, the 2008 meeting took as its keynote the importance of engaging the younger generation of scientists to lead future developments in a world community increasingly dependent upon information and scientific data. The Young Scientists’ sessions were some of the best attended of the conference..

CODATA would like to acknowledge the contribution of Brian McMahon, IUCr Delegate, to this article. Brian’s excellent and detailed review of the conference can be found in his personal report submitted to the IUCr from the link on the CODATA home page (http://www.codata.org) or on the website at http://www.iucr.org/resources/data/meeting-reports/codata-2008.