Showcasing Australian data to the world!

By Damien Irving.

At the end of a typical Software Carpentry workshop, participants have acquired a range of generic programming skills. The obvious next question is, “how do I apply these generic skills in my research discipline?” To help researchers with this question, Software Carpentry is building up a collection of discipline specific capstone examples. Participants can either be referred to these examples as further reading, or at workshops where the audience has a common background / research discipline, the example can be delivered in the final 1-2 hours of the workshop.

As part of the Mozilla Science Lab global sprint, I developed a capstone example for the weather, climate and ocean sciences (see here for the lesson and here for the source code). I’m a big fan of the work the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) has been doing to make their data openly (and easily) available via the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) Portal, so I decided to base the example around an analysis of IMOS surface ocean data from the Turquoise Coast in Western Australia (see the relevant Research Data Australia entry for details of the dataset).

There’s been almost 200 Software Carpentry workshops held around the world over the last 12 months (check out this impressive map for details), plus countless other workshops and classes that have borrowed from their lesson materials, so it’s fair to say that this capstone example will generate some great exposure for IMOS, AODN and Research Data Australia. In fact, it has already been used (or is going to be used in some form) at the following events:

Recognising this as a great way to increase national and international usage of Australian data, the Australian National Data Service have agreed to sponsor the development of capstone examples for a number of other disciplines. Watch this space!

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  1. resbaz posted this