Research Data Alliance: Current Activities and Expected Impact
- 1. Research Data Alliance: Current Activities and Expected Impact SGBD Workshop, May 2014 Herman Stehouwer
- 2. 2The Vision 2 Researchers and innovators openly share data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society. RDA is building the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data. Researchers, scientists, data practitioners from around the world are invited to work together with us to achieve the RDA vision
- 3. 3 “Knowledge is the engine of our economy. And data is its fuel.” (Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission) RDA – Research Data Alliance Data will become the key resource to tackle the big challenges in the world
- 4. 4 RDA – Research Data Alliance How to tackle big challenges if data is highly fragmented by disciplines, domains and countries? RDA is building bridges to overcome the hurdles for easy data access, data sharing and interoperability by facilitating collaboration between experts from all over the world belonging to different disciplines and organisations
- 5. 5 RDA – How does it work? Experts and Data practitioners come together in RDA Working and Interest Groups to overcome concrete hurdles They discuss matters at the Plenaries and on the RDA online platform They discuss matters at the Plenaries and on the RDA online platform
- 6. 6 May 2014 - The orchard needs to be managed Rescuing Heritage Structural Biology Wheat Interop Life Sciences Photon & Neutron Toxico genomics Public Sector info Agricultural Marine History & ethnogr’y Data Types Registries PIds Metadata Preservation Semantic Interop Federated Ids Provenance Data citation Data publication Data bibliometrics Applications draw up data from the ground like water Technologies make data discoverable and accessible RDA is the trunk that brings the two together
- 7. 7 RDA Working Groups Form the Foundation for RDA Community Impact! Working Groups envisioned as accelerants to data sharing practice and infrastructure in the short-term with the overarching goal of advancing global data-driven discovery and innovation RDA Working Group profile: Short-term: 12-18 months Focused efforts with specific actions adopted by specific communities International participation Open, voluntary, consensus-driven Complementary to effective efforts elsewhere Potential outcomes / deliverables: •New data standards or harmonization of existing standards. •Greater data sharing, exchange, interoperability, usability and re-usability. •Greater discoverability of research data sets. •Better management, stewardship, and preservation of research data.
- 8. 8 • An Interest Group (IGs) can be established prior to a Working Group for community discussion of issues and areas that facilitate data-driven research. • IGs are longer-term groups defining common issues and interests. •WGs and IGs are collaborating intensively with groups in comparable initiatives such as IETF, CODATA, WDS, W3C. RDA Interest Groups
- 9. 9 The RDA Engine – Working & Interest Groups 9 Working groups including Community Capability Model, Data Citation, Data Foundation and Terminology, Data Type Registries... https://rd-alliance.org/workinggroup-list.html 24 Interest groups including Agricultural Data Interoperability, Big Data Analytics... https://rd-alliance.org/interestgroup-list.html including joint groups with CODATA and WDS
- 10. 10 Data Foundation and Terminology WG Currently scientific communities are working on their own data organizations and even within communities there is a lot of heterogenity -> different data models and terminology • This WG is building a reference data model • Core for trust: Metadata PID Find, Access, Interpret, Re-use Currently 21 approaches are being studied •Goal to come to a harmonized, reference model with a widely agreed terminology Examples from WGs
- 11. 11 PID information types WG • Persistent identifiers (PID) are the core of proper data management and access •This WG will provide a first solution for standardized PID types •Later, the WG will design and implement an API for interaction with typed information •Automated data management across disciplines and repositories can highly benefit from standardized types Examples from WGs
- 12. 12 Data Type Registry WG •There are so many data types in use, and new ones are continuously defined in science •The result is that often researchers see interesting data, but don’t know how to open, process or visualize the data •This WG is implementing a type registry for data, which explains how to open, visualize and process the data • New data types can be added to the register with information how to open, visualize and process the data •In september a worldwide setup for a type registry is expected from this work package Examples from WGs
- 13. 13 Metadata Standards Directory WG Registration of existing Metadata schemes Communities, initiatives need to make their choices explicit. Controlled vocabularies often are key to understand the categories. Communities can look for standards that come close to their needs. Ability to harvest other metadata, interpret and map it semantically. A first step to formalize the metadata domain to enable efficient machine processing of metadata. Examples from WGs
- 14. 14 Practical Policy WG Computer Actionable Policies to identify a number of typical application scenarios for policies such as replication, preservation etc. to collect exemplary practical policies for a first number of such application scenarios, register them, allow people to compare and re-use them and to extract options for commonalities and optimizations to create awareness about ways to come to reproducible science, to come to trusted repositories and to allow proper certification Examples from WGs
- 15. 15 Five first groups Essential data life-cycle building blocks / bridges Expected Impact creating data preserving data re-using data giving access to data processing data analysing data Data LifeCycle
- 16. 16 Community-Driven RDA Groups by Focus Reference and Sharing - focused Data Citation IG Data Categories and Codes WG Legal Interoperability IG Community Needs - focused Community Capability Model IG Engagement IG Clouds in Developing Countries IG
- 17. 17 RDA Plenary Meetings … Plenary 1 – 18- 20 March 2013 Goteborg, Sweden 240 participants 3 WG, 9 IG Plenary 2 - 18-20 September 2013 in Washington, DC, USA 380 participants 6 WG, 17 IG, 5 BOF Plenary 3 - 26-28 March 2014 in Dublin, Ireland 490 participants 16 WG, 35 IG and 20 BOF meetings 10 co-located workshops & meetings Plenary 4 - 22-24 September 2014 , Amsterdam, Netherlands Working & interest groups get together and hold face-to-face discussions New groups proposals & Birds of a Feather RDA member networking Co-located events
- 18. 18 How can you become a member? Register to the on-line community and become a Member of RDA. No fees involved for individual participation. Membership is open to any individual who subscribes to the RDA Guiding Principles. As a Member one may join and form Working and Interest Groups and participate in RDA elections. https://www.rd-alliance.org/user/register
- 19. 19 How can your Organisation become a member? Organisational Members can include R&D agencies, for- profit companies and non-profit foundations, community organizations, institutions, etc. Annual membership fee based on size of organisation (in number of persons). Why should your Organisation become a member? Affiliation with likeminded organisations in order to coordinate efforts in mutual areas of interest and to avoid unnecessary duplication and conflict.
- 20. 20 What Organisations can you team up with?
- 21. 21 European Scientists feedback on RDA …. A number of issues emerged as essential in helping to achieve the RDA vision: Infrastructures must work and be persistent and sustainable, i.e. the work must be repeatable in a number of years. Work must be reproducible. Credit must be given for work and this credit must be useful in careers. Data must be referable. Infrastructures must be trustworthy and this trust must be earned. …… for complete outputs see rd-alliance.org Exchange and interaction with European Scientists on a wide range of topics including Sharing and Re-use of Data, Publishing and Citing Data, Infrastructures and Repositories
- 23. 23 RDA Collaborative Web Platform rd-alliance.org Interaction with RDA enquiries@rd-alliance.org RDA Europe rda-europe@rd-alliance.org | europe.rd-alliance.org