The funding agencies and societies have commissioned a multitude of biological databases, 2334 at last count according to the NIF Registry, and the question that we keep hearing is "my renewal is dead" from many of them largely because of innovation. I would really like to know if there is a good reason to rebuild a database every 2-5 years?
Anita, a database, not matter of the type of the data it holds, needs to pass to cycles of rebuild as you say for some reasons:
1) The initial database structure (the database model) needs to be on pair with advances on the domain knowledge;
2) The amount of data over time will change the behavior of the database in terms of performance, so changes are needed to ensure the database continues to provide the answers needed with good performance;
3) The amount of data also affects the hardware, mainly storage;
4) There the database software upgrades that needs to be applied in order to keep technical support. Sometimes, version changes could impact the way certain things are modeled in your database structure and, therefore, need to be changed.
All the reasons above are what keep running support teams specific for databases in all and every medium to large company around the globe, so would fit also here.
Hope this helps,
Walter.
One solution is systematic, permanent archiving of data used in publications:
http://thedata.org/
Dear Kim,
Granted, there is a good reason to archive the data from each publication. Thank you, the work on dataverse and the data citation principles in Force11 is highly relevant. However, when people work to create tools and databases I am still not clear on what exactly gets archived. Furthermore, do you archive if there is no publication associated? I am thinking not about just some desk drawer in my old lab, but about significant and well known resources such as some of the Allen institute brain-maps that may be many terabytes of unpublished data that are widely referenced in literature. Should there be an archive at each time point of the whole data set, parts of it?
My original question deals with how to deal with databases, like DataVerse, in terms of long term support. What happens to DataVerse data in five years? There is no proper paper published on DataVerse, so what happens to all the data archived there? If there was a paper published on it, would it back up all the data in there?
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