For the last 20 years or so the biennial SIMS Europe conference has been hosted by the University of Münster in Germany. However, this year it was hosted by the University of Nottingham in the UK.
FAIRSpectra were kindly gifted an exhibition stand by the organisers to promote the initiative. Here attendees were invited to complete a survey of attitudes to Open Data. Alex Henderson also exhibited a poster (pdf) on the ways the FAIRSpectra initiative can engage with the SIMS community.
SIMS Europe exhibition stand
SIMS Europe poster
The conference was well attended and there was much discussion at the exhibition stand about the benefits of data sharing, or otherwise. Most of the academics thought data sharing was a good idea, but there was difficulty in knowing how to go about it appropriately. The commercial audience felt that data sharing was not suitable in a business environment. This section of the community will need to be convinced that having data stored in an easily accessible file format, with good metadata, can help data integration even within a company’s walls.