What makes up data curation?

Following some discussion at the Digital Curation Conference in Edinburgh, how about this:

Data Curation comprises

• Data management
• Adding value to data
• Data sharing for re-use
• Data preservation for later re-use

Is that a good breakdown for you? Should data creation be in there? I tend to think that data creation belongs to the researcher; once created, the data immediately falls into the data management and adding value categories.

Adding value will have many elements. I’m not sure if collecting and associating contextual metadata is part of adding value, or simply good data management!

Heard at the conference: context is the new metadata (thanks Graeme Pow!).