Reiseführer*innen für Datenwissenschaftler*innen? Drei Wege zum Ziel für Informationsprofis. 

„Datenwissenschaftler*innen lieben gute, strukturierte Daten. Informationsexpert*innen wissen, wo sie diese Daten bekommen können.“ 

So beschrieb ein Informationsexperte eines großen Pharmaunternehmens, was die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Infoprofis und Datenwissenschaftler*innen in seiner Organisation antreibt. Er bemerkte: „Das Einzige, was unseren Forscher*innen und Datenwissenschaftler*innen fehlt, ist Zeit, und sie brauchen Informationsspezialist*innen, die die Datenquellen verstehen. Die Wissenschaftler*innen schätzen unseren Fokus auf Datenqualität und unsere Fähigkeit, die Daten mit einer speziellen Taxonomie anzureichern.” 

Tatsächlich sieht er sich selbst als Informationsreiseführer, der dabei hilft, die Datenwissenschaftler*innen seiner Organisation mit den richtigen Datenquellen für jedes Projekt zu verbinden und Text- und Data-Mining-Lizenzen zu arrangieren, damit die Wissenschaftler*innen aus den Daten Erkenntnisse gewinnen können. 

Sie fragen sich, wie Sie als „Informationsreiseführer“ fungieren können? Die nötigen Tipps finden Sie in dem nachfolgenden Blogpost, der zunächst im Blog des CCC erschienen ist. 

Reach out to your entry-level colleagues 

This is particularly important with data scientists who are recent graduates; while they are familiar with high-powered tools for data analysis, they often need support in working with project stakeholders and applying the tools to specific business problems. As the information professional noted, some new hires come from a linguistics background; applying their knowledge to the pharmaceutical industry requires significant adjustment.  

While information professionals need not have expertise as programmers, he sees the importance of understanding the basic concepts and language of data science. “There is such potential for collaboration, particularly as we are looking at large language models and prompt engineering,” he observed. “It’s easy to get intimidated by the complexity of the data, until we remember that we bring our expertise in information management. While the data scientists get focused on building a new algorithm to solve a particular problem, we info pros can point them to a system we already have in place or to an approach others have taken to address the issue.”    

Share what you’re doing behind the scenes  

One of the important roles information professionals can play in supporting data scientists is in evaluating output and identifying ways to bring more structure to unstructured data. As this info pro described it, “we work with the data scientists on entity extraction, making sure that it is normalized according to our ontologies. The scientists assume that this works automatically; they often don’t see that we are evaluating the quality of the search results, determining whether this three-letter acronym references a process or is just the initials in an author’s name, for example. We think about the real-world problems that can pop up when we normalize the data. Sometimes that involves reviewing the output and manually curating the data based on our knowledge of users’ searching behavior.”  

Be adaptable and stay on top of emerging needs  

The job of information professionals is to give the scientists more context around the information, he said. “We look for ways to link data more effectively, to help the scientists address the most important business challenges. And we work hard on finding ways to calculate what is relevant and useful to each scientist. This is a moving target—what their interests are today may not be what they are focused in six months from now. We have to stay on top of their priorities so that we are feeding them the information they care about today.” By focusing on the emerging information needs of the data scientists, information professionals can contribute to addressing the most critical issues their enterprise is facing.   

This is the final installment of Mary Ellen Bates’ series around Info Pros in a Data-Driven Enterprise. To see the previous blog posts in this series, check out:  

• Fünf Tipps zur Förderung der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Informationsprofis und Datenwissenschaftler:innen    
• Podcast mit Mary Ellen Bates : Info-Profis in einem datengesteuerten Unternehmen