Data curation

Data curation is the organization and integration of data collected from various sources. This process involves annotation, publication and presentation of the data, with the objective of preserving its value over time and ensuring its continued availability for reuse and preservation. Data curation includes "all the processes needed for principled and controlled data creation, maintenance, and management, together with the capacity to add value to data". In science, data curation may indicate the process of extracting important information from scientific texts, such as research articles by experts, and converting it into an electronic format, such as an entry into a biological database.

In the contemporary era of big data, the curation of data has become increasingly prominent, particularly for software processing high-volume and complex data systems. The term is also used within the humanities, where increasing cultural and scholarly data from digital humanities projects requires the expertise and analytical practices of data curation. In broad terms, curation encompasses a range of activities and processes involved in the creation, management, maintenance, and validation of a component. Specifically, data curation is the attempt to determine what information is worth saving and for how long.