The DEDICATE seminar has been a splendid opportunity to discuss the curation and management of Built Environment related data as both a cultural phenomenon interpreted by a variety of professional communities and disciplines and a common technological framework for their activities.

This event especially pointed out the commonalities into both the stakeholders communities' necessities and requirements and, we think, stressed the urgent need for a shared agenda for this field.

I really feel obliged toward all the people that contributed to this event. In particular, I would like to thank all the speakers for both their generous presentations and the precious debate animation that concluded the event.

Today, with some delay, we publish in this post the presentations from the DEDICATE final seminar.

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Proprietary data formats, undisclosed specifications, partial standardisation, lack of adequate open formats, and the fast obsolescence of hardware, supporting operative systems and software are the major issues undermining both the data survival and reuse. Over-reliance on proprietary solutions, inadequate enrichment of assets with metadata, informal retention policies, idiosyncratic archival and management of data files are also important causes of information loss that occur just at the assets creation stage and that in some cases, such as in the AEC (Architecture Engineering Construction) sector determine economical damages even in the short term.

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As the design processes in architectural practices switch toward entirely digital workflows, architects are gradually required, because of their legal and commercial liability, to provide for both a relatively long term curation of their own digital products and the deposit of authoritative data. But, despite being the sole curation actors for their data, architects receive little education or training in either pertinent competences nor agreed and established procedures to comply with these duties.

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Quite often I am addressed by architects the question “What are the benefit for us of dealing with data management?”. I think the first and unsatisfactory answer should be “The very Architects professional development and a stronger legal management for their products.”, but I usually try to go into the details of what data management actually is within architectural practices – that is explaining its coincidence with digital design workflows and not just post-hoc archival procedures.

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Many lifecycle models for digital assets have been proposed according to specific disciplines needs or adherence to standards (Higgins 2008). More generally, the data lifecycle results a direct implication of the data application lifecycle, especially in fields where the Archive is not a natural/legal destination. As a connection for the sequences of operations on data, the information transmission is the key event articulating the data lifecycle, wether it happens between operators, tools or automatic processes.

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Having settled that the variation among competing terms describing the activity of managing digital products is due to more than confusion or carelessness, in order to expand on the unique scope of this project, it is worth to explain the affiliation of this research to the Digital Curation field. Let's put aside here any obvious genealogical consideration arising from the context where this research developed and now is hosted, that is the HATII, a world leading institution in this field.

So, which aspects of the Digital Curation approach to investigation and curatorial practice are crucial for this investigation?

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It looks as if we two never will be one, something must be done (sing-along reading is encouraged): you say Data Curation and I say Digital Curation, you say Digital Stewardship and I say Digital Preservation, ... 

The famous song by George and Ira Gershwin I have played with above depicts a playful quarrel of lovers whose affaire appears to be doomed by their disparate social origins. A similar “dialectical” differentiation has been promoted by the disciplines within the domain of Library and Information Sciences on the ground of their differences in operational contexts, professional competences and theoretical scopes. More often than not, the educational objectives of research institutions have contributed to create such distinctions too, for example promoting legacy specialisations or, on the contrary, launching new curricula.

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