[SigLT-L] SIG-LT "disparate data" panel for Annual 2008

[Janet Arth]

Hi all,
Here is a composite of the suggestions received for one of the SIG LT 
panels a the 2008 ASIST annual meeting -

1) From the SIG LT Planning meeting:
  Local loading of data, managing disparate data
   Peter Murray (OhioLink)
   Los Alamos Lab
   OCUL - Peter at University of Toronto (Pascal knows the contact)

  The first two were sites where they might be using federated 
searching across more traditional bib sources (e.g., marc catalog 
data and the indexing and abstracting services records); the work at 
the third site has a broader mix of materials.

2) From side conversations at the ASIST meeting:
   California Digital Library - including Calisphere and the Online 
Archive of California
   OCLC's study of related data issues
   Cornell Libraries projects

3) Responses from you all:
   a) investigating foundational causes of "disparate data" in 
federated searching and the need for ontological crosswalking (e.g., 
how different databases process queries on the same topic, knowledge 
domains structures, bridging the ontology gaps in multi-, inter-, and 
trans- disciplinary research areas, optimizing searching in elearning 
environments
   b) speaker idea: someone from the LC Working Group on the Future 
of Bibliographic Control
   c) speaker idea: "expert" searcher like Mary Ellen Bates (does 
anyone know if she, as a business research consultant does 
presentations with no funding, i.e., paying her own way?)
   d) issues/application of federated search for scientific data/datasets

Here is the conference "theme" -
People Transforming Information - Information Transforming People
The complete call for proposals is here: 
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM08/AM08_cfp.doc

So we definitely have a lot of ideas.  My current thinking is this:

1) Projects
   Reports from different projects/implementations on their 
particular issues and how they hope to resolve them - we have a nice 
group of suggestions (and, in my opinion, only seem to be only 
lacking in getting a non-North America perspective).  I like the idea 
of hearing about the NASA, the Canadian and the CDL projects.  That 
seems like a good balance of sciences, humanities and social 
sciences, if my understanding of the projects is correct.

2) Research Perspective and Reactors to the Projects
   A speaker that can discuss ontological crosswalking and more, 
possibly ideas/models that might work with the type of 
content/approaches described by the first group of speakers; the 
information science perspective - tbd
   Someone on the LC committee (or someone very familiar with the 
work of the group) who can address issues from the "current" library 
perspective - tbd
   Getting an expert searcher as a reactor could work here, if no 
money needs to change hands; or someone from another research perspective.

Hard to say if we can manage a panel with four or more presenters 
since the times allowed are not explicitly addressed in the call for 
proposals, but generally 1.5 hours has been the time allotted to a 
session.  We could do two consecutive sessions, part one the projects 
and part two a mix of research and feedback.  I see a couple of these 
two part sessions each year.  Does that decrease our likelihood of 
acceptance?

Does this sound interesting?  Informative?  I'm open to speaker 
suggestions, esp. if we try to do the two part session, where we 
would need folks that know their subjects and can think on there feet 
as the reactors.

All for now, Janet