Bielefeld Center for Data Science
BiCDaS Research
Data Science research is conducted every day in every discipline, institution and faculty throughout Bielefeld University. BiCDaS's main function is supporting this research in many ways. I.e., research is primarily conducted at the faculties and in various projects and only a minor portion is conducted at BiCDaS.
BiCDaS members' research topics range from digital humanities to high-energy physics; from business studies to genomics. BiCDaS also maintains various partnerships with different initiatives and institutions at Bielefeld University and beyond. All of these researchers have their own, specific data and subsequent challenges.
However, they also have a lot in common. In particular different data types reoccur in different sciences. It is stated in the BiCDaS position paper:
...radio telescopes in astronomy generate digital signals that can be described using the same fundamental terms as EEG data in neuroscience, and dynamic systems in economics can be studied with methods that have already proven beneficial in physics.
This makes us believe that researchers from different fields working on data of the same basic nature or type can and should engage in a mutually beneficial exchange. We subsume this conviction to put the nature of research data above discipline boundaries in the catch-phrase
Data First!
A common model for data in science and beyond is the data life cycle of which various protagonists in the field have formulated their own variant and BiCDaS is no exception to that. The model that is the data life cycle helps us to structure strategic considerations and develop the topic.
One consequence of this considerations is we believe that, while classical paper publications are and will remain important, publications of data and analytic code are equally important and should be honoured as scientific contributions in their own right.