EGENIS seminar: "Data Integration without Unification", Beckett Sterner (Arizona State University)

How should billions of species observations worldwide be made reusable? Data unification according to a universal hierarchy of domains has been a popular ideal for biodiversity science, but it relies on heuristic assumptions that are known to fail systematically in practice. We propose a new regulative ideal for how scientists can coordinate their knowledge-making without unification to achieve better results when pluralistic conditions apply. We focus on data pooling as a crucial form of integrative research in science that supports data reuse. We define data pooling as a process that combines data from multiple sources into one harmonized body of information, provide infrastructure for managing and accessing the combined data, and governs it as a shared resource for a community of users and stakeholders beyond a single research project or lab.