Special Lecture

Advancing Cyberinfrastructure through Metadata Research

Wednesday, March 12, 2014
12:40 pm to 2:00 pm
Jane Greenberg

Advancing Cyberinfrastructure through Metadata Research

Advancing Cyberinfrastructure through Metadata Research

Ongoing national and global cyberinfrastructure initiatives pose significant information organization challenges. Research targeting metadata helps address these challenges. This presentation covers a set of studies investigating technical, conceptual, and semantic-driven metadata solutions for organizing the deluge of digital data. The presentation introduces the Dryad data repository and the HIVE ontology environment; outlines motivating research questions and methods; and highlights key findings to date, noting the wider implications of this work. Further, I will describe new research emphases, including work as a Data Science Fellow at the National Consortium for Data Science, in affiliation with the Renaissance Computing Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I conclude by discussing how research focusing on metadata is an integral component of information organization and integrates with the I School environment.

Jane Greenberg is a professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the director of the SILS Metadata Research Center. She also holds posts as a senior scientist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham North Carolina, and as a 2014 data fellow at the National Consortium for Data Science, in affiliation with the Renaissance Computing Institute, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her research and teaching foci are in the areas of metadata, knowledge organization, data science, and the semantic web/linked data. Her research support has included funding from the NSF, IMLS, NIH, Microsoft Research, the Library of Congress, OCLC, and the UNC Research Council.

Professor Greenberg is the principal investigator of the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE) initiative, a dynamic linked data ontology application; and a co-principal investigator on the Dryad data repository project. She currently serves as co-chair of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Metadata Standards Directory Working Group; co-lead of the Dublin Core Science and Metadata (SAM) community; co-lead of the DataONE Metadata and Preservation Working Group; and vice chair of the CODATA Data-at-Risk Working Group. She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics, and Ontologies; Journal of Library Metadata; and Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. She was Program Committee co-chair for the 2013 MTSR: Metadata & Semantics Research Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece, and co-editor of the conference proceedings published by Springer Verlag. Her research has been recognized through awards including the Mann Citation; the Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research; a SemSearch Best Paper Award, International W3C Conference; and the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology. In 2012 she was awarded a Catedrática de Excelencia (Chair of Excellence) at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain; she, her husband, and two children lived and enjoyed life in Spain during this time.

Last updated:

August 23, 2016