RDA

See also: Outcome of the 2nd RDA Plenary Meeting, Washington DC, 16-18 September 2013

 

About RDA

The Research Data Alliance aims to accelerate and facilitate research data sharing and exchange. The work of the Research Data Alliance is primarily undertaken through its working groups and interest groups. Participation in working groups and interest groups, starting new working groups, and attendance at the twice-yearly plenary meetings is open to all.

All of society’s grand challenges, addressing rapid climate change, curing cancer and other diseases, feeding and watering 7+ billion people, understanding the origins of the universe or the mind—all  require diverse, and sometimes very large data to be shared and integrated across cultures, scales, and technologies. This requires a new form and new conception of infrastructure. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is driving a creating and implementing this new data infrastructure. As an international group, we are building the social and technical connections that make data work across barriers.
RDA promotes and encourages both a bottom-up and interdisciplinary approach to solving these global challenges, inviting researchers, scientists, data practitioners and other interested stakeholders from around the world to work together to achieve the RDA vision - An open, seamless, self-regulatory global digital data infrastructure that is the foundation for discovery and progress.

Why is RDA important for IODE?

RDA aims to bring together experts from various scientific and technical disciplines dealing with data and information management. Within the IODE community we are dealing with the same or similar issues in data management: metadata, vocabularies, persistent identifiers, long-term preservation, data citation, etc. By sharing our experience across disciplines we may be able to work better and we may be able to respond to society’s demand for multidisciplinary data services and products. Through involvement in RDA we may be able to interconnect our data systems. The vision statement of the IOC Strategic Plan for Oceanographic data and Information Management (2013-2016) is: “A comprehensive and integrated ocean data and information system, serving the broad and diverse needs of IOC Member States, for both routine and scientific use”.

What can RDA do for you?

RDA is member-driven initiative, as is IODE. Through RDA you can network with experts working in a different domain on issues similar to yours, sharing experience and expand your expertise. Together with RDA we can expand the pool of experts dealing with the many critical issues that face us today.

What issues is RDA dealing with today?

In September 2013 the RDA had a total of 8 working groups and 18 interest groups. Anyone can join (subscribe to) a group and participate in the online discussions. 

Working Groups
1. Community Capability Model
The RDA Community Capability Model (CCM) Working Group (WG) collects, validates and publishes a range of data-centric “capability profiles” to enhance inter- and intra-domain interoperability and catalyse RDA data-sharing goals. Various barriers (technical, social, legal, ethical), currently make this difficult to achieve beyond established domain community boundaries, limiting the penetration and impact of data-intensive research. The CCM-WG also has potential to adopt a foundational role in synthesising outputs from other RDA WGs.

2. Data Citation
The RDA Working Group on Data Citation (WG-DC) aims to bring together agroup of experts to discuss the issues, requirements, advantages and shortcomings of existing approaches for efficiently citing subsets of data. The WG-DC focuses on a narrow field where we can contribute significantly and provide prototypes and reference implementations.

3. Data Foundation and Terminology
The DFT WG task is to describe a basic, abstract data organization model which can be used to derive a reference data terminology that can be used across communities and stakeholders to better synchronize conceptualization, to enable better understanding within and between communities and finallyto stimulate tool building, such as for data services, supportive of the basic model’s use. We assume that this abstract data organization model will focus on common building blocks and their characteristics, along with relevant protocols. 

4. Data Type Registries
The Data Type Registries Working Group will compile a set of use cases for data type use and management. It will identify and distinguish among existing ‘type registry’ efforts and their potential interaction with this group and formulate a data model and expression for types. It will also design a functional specification for type registries and propose a federation strategy among multiple type registries at both technical and organizational levels.

5. Metadata Standards Directory (MASDIR)
The RDA Metadata Standards Directory (MASDIR) Working Group is supported by individuals and organizations involved in the development, implementation, and use of metadata for scientific data. The overriding goal is to develop a collaborative, open directory of metadata standards applicable to scientific data can help address infrastructure challenges

6. PID Information Types
In complex data domains, unique and persistent identifiers (PIDs) associated with specific information are the core of proper data management and access. They can be used to give every data object (including collection objects) an identity that enables referring to the data resources and metadata and, additionally, to prove integrity, authenticity and other attributes. But this requires a PID to be uniquely associated with specific types of information, and those types and their association with PIDs must be well managed. Therefore it is useful to specify a framework for information types, to start agreeing on some essential types, and to define a process by which other types can be integrated. The framework provides generic facilities only, which can and must be employed by specific communities to support their needs. The focus of the working group therefore is on cross-community concerns.

7. Practical Policy
Computer actionable policies are used to enforce management, automate administrative tasks, validate assessment criteria, and automate scientific analyses.  The benefits of using policies include mimization of the amount of labor needed to manage a collection, the ability to publish to the users the rules that are being used, and the ability to automate process management. The Practical Policy Working Group will assemble a collection of production and research policies, analyze the submitted policies to identify best practices, and promote the formation of policy-based data management systems. Categories of computer actionable policies will be defined to simplify policy-based interoperability, with the goal of identifying a minimal desired set for policies for each category that can be used as a starter kit.  Example categories include collaboration, publication, preservation, curation, and data processing.

8. Standardisation of data categories and codes

Working Group on Standardisation of data categories and codes, working specifically with the ISO 639. The outputs of this Working Group will assist with greater data sharing, data discovery, and interoperability of repositories/archives.

Interest Groups
1. Agricultural Data Interoperability
The Agricultural Data Interest Group is a domain oriented interest group to work on all issues related to data important for the development of global agriculture. The interest group aims to represent all stakeholders producing, managing, aggregating, sharing and consuming data for agricultural research and innovation. Efforts will be made to get an active representation of the major international institutions, which work on agricultural research and innovation. It will take stock of existing problems and experiences and will pave the way for a number of domain specific working groups to make precise proposals for solution in specific area. This interest group will help to promote good practices in our research domain : data sharing policies, data management plan, data interoperability.

2. Big Data Analytics
The Big Data Analytics (BDA) Interest Groups seeks to develop community based recommendations on feasible data analytics approaches to address scientific community needs of utilizing large quantities of data. BDA seeks to analyze different scientific domain applications and their potential use of various big data analytics techniques. A systematic classification of feasible combinations of analysis algorithms, analytical tools, data and resource characteristics and scientific queries will be covered in these recommendations.

3. Brokering
The purpose of the Brokering Interest Group is to provide a truly cross-disciplinary, global forum for data providers, cyberinfrastructure developers, and data users to discuss short and long terms steps that could be taken to make data more available and interoperable through the services of brokering frameworks (see definition below).  The intention is that as the community will define well-scoped, concrete steps forward, and that working groups will be spun off to implement them.

4. Certification of Digital Repositories

In order to guarantee data sharing, the long-term preservation of these data in sustainable digital repositories is a sine qua non. Data that are created and used by science and scholarship need to be managed, curated and archived, making sure that the substantial investments in preparing and presenting the content and tools will not be lost. Researchers need to be sure that the resources the repositories offer remain meaningful and usable over time. Moreover, the repositories themselves need to have sustainable business models. Preservation and sustainability raise challenges in many areas. The main issues related to long term preservation and sustainability remain basically unresolved, as many organizational, technical, financial and legal aspects remain open. Certification is therefore fundamental in guaranteeing the trustworthiness of digital repositories and thus in sustaining the opportunities for long-term data sharing. The Working Group will build on previous work in the area of certification. It will deliver the global overview and the necessary recommendations and requirements that allow the effective implementation of certification of digital repositories on a national, European and even global level.

5. Data in Context
With massively growing amounts of data, metadata have gained increasing importance. Not always is the value of metadata itself appropriately acknowledged, and there are different notions of metadata; what is counted as data and what as metadata also varies. The curation of metadata is expected to contribute to improvements in information quality and reliability, and also to managing access and thus openness of the underlying data. Increasingly, it becomes clear that getting an overview about data collections in the age of “big data” is crucial in every advanced information management environment. This working group focuses on “contextual metadata”, and will start its activities by anticipating a particular set of viewpoints or use cases from within different scientific domains.

6. Defining Urban Data Exchange for Science
The goal of this Interest Group is to define urban data exchange for science.

7. Digital Practices in History and Ethnography

8. Engagement Group
The global data use and sharing will be robust and sustainable only with researchers’ engagement and participation.The Engagement Working Group (RDA-Engage) is a collaborative whose purpose is to engage researchers in the development and implementation of RDA decisions. We will begin with Earth sciences and extend our efforts into other research communities as well as other stakeholders, such as librarians, data managers, and IT providers.

9. Legal Interoperability

The proposed Research Data Alliance – CODATA Working Group on Legal Interoperability of Research Data (RDA-CODATA WG), will be established to address and promote the following objectives:

• Define legal interoperability of research data and articulate why it is important for data interoperability and reuse.
• Document and analyze up to four case studies in the areas of geoscience, biodiversity research, social sciences, and humanities of legal interoperability solutions in interdisciplinary and international contexts. 
• Develop and publish core principles and guidelines of best practices through which legal interoperability can be achieved, and link to related information resources online.
• Work with key stakeholder groups to get the core principles and guidelines of best practices adopted.
• Generally promote better understanding and greater use by the stakeholder groups in the research community of the agreed approaches to legal interoperability of research data, focused on highlighting and enabling better integration and reuse of such data.

10. Long tail of research data
Universities and research institutions are becoming increasingly interested in collecting and providing access to datasets produced at their institution that do not fall within the scope of other discipline-based, or government repositories. The aim of this Interest Group is to develop a set of good practices for managing research data archived in the university context. The scope of the topic will be limited to the data generated in universities and research institutions and the role of institutional repositories and libraries as agents of the institutional data management.

11. Marine Data Harmonization
The objective of this working group is to promote the development of a common global framework for the management of marine data. This has become a priority as ocean sciences are being becoming increasingly global in scope and there has been a paradigm shift in marine research from the traditional discipline based approach towards more multidsicplinary, ecosystem level research. This approach is necessary to address a number of phenomena both natural and man-made the impacts of which require researchers from a diverse range of disciplines to work together. A pre-requisite for this type of multidisciplinary research is the availability of large volumes of good quality interoperable data which can be easily located and accessed. Facilitating the re-use of marine data is therefore a priority as the need for datasets increases to support the development of this ecosystem based approach to marine research. 

12. Metadata IG

The Metadata IG will concern itself with all aspects of metadata for research data.  In particular it will attempt to coordinate the efforts of the WGs concerned with metadata to produce a coherent approach to metadata covering metadata modalities of description, restriction, navigation, provenance, preservation and the use of metadata for the purposes discovery, contextualisation, validation, analytical processing, simulation, visualisation and interoperation.  It will also liaise with the other WGs especially Data Foundation and Terminology, PIDs, Standardisation of data categories and codes and Data Citation.  This IG activity relates to data management policies and plans of research organisations and researchers, and to policies and standards of research funders and of research communities which may or may not be official standards. The metadata IG will organise itself through online meetings and face-to-face meetings of members of the IG present at RDA Plenary events.  It is proposed that – while membership is open to any RDA registered member – key members will be the leaders of the WGs concerned with metadata.  In order to get the renovated IG working I volunteer to initiate this activity but would expect elections and handover to someone else after an initial period.

13. Preservation e-Infrastructure IG
The purpose of the PeIIG is to reach wide agreement on the e-Infrastructure services which are needed to help repositories to preserve their data holdings, to ensure the interoperability of service implementations, and to build trust of service providers. Such distributed services supporting interoperability, including those that support continued usability, authenticity, accessibiliy, retrievability, visualization and replication, should allow the repositories to simplify, share the cost of, and improve, their preservation activities.

14. Publishing Data IG
The Publishing Data Interest Group brings together all stakeholders involved in publishing research data including researchers, discipline specific and institutional data repositories, academic publishers, funders and service providers. Every effort will be made to get a good representation from related international programmes, their working groups and other private or institutional activities involved in this area. We will build on existing resources, reports and other shared experiences from the different stakeholders and will nurture more specific and targeted working groups addressing practical aspects in publishing research data.  As such, the Publishing Data Interest Group can be regarded as a broad and inclusive forum for interested individuals to contribute to and test, validate and promote the findings of the Working Groups. In particular we plan to address the implementation of workflows for publishing data and therefore help establish appropriate supporting infrastructure.

15. Research Data Provenance IG

Tracking provenance for research data is vital to science and scholarship, providing answers to common questions researchers pose when sharing and exchanging data: Where did it come from? Who modified it? Is this copy the same as the copy I deposited? In what way is it the same? How do I resolve discrepancies or anomalies?

This group focuses on the comparison and evaluation of models for data provenance. It is concerned with questions of data origins, maintenance of identity through the data lifecycle, and how we account for data modification. Objectives of this group include: recommending general and expressive frameworks for documenting research data transactions proposing syntheses of complementary provenance views, and relating data provenance to problems of scientific equivalence and the assessment of data quality.

The Research Data Provenance group anticipates potential intersections with the Data Citation, Data Foundation and Terminology, and Metadata Standards working groups as well as the Data in Context interest group.

16. Structural Biology IG
Structural Biology (SB) is concerned with the determination of the three-dimensional (3D) structures of individual biomacromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids), and with those of complexes and higher order structures formed by association of these individual components. The ultimate goal of SB is to understand the mode of action of these biological nano machines, based on their static 3D structures, their dynamic characteristics, and the ways in which they interact both with other macromolecules and with small ligands such as drugs and agrochemicals. SB contributes to society by supporting a range of applications including drug design, crop improvement, and engineering of enzymes of industrial significance.

17. Toxicogenomics Interoperability IG
The objective of this interest group is to prepare for a working group on toxicogenomics interoperability. The aim of the working group is to outline a roadmap toward enhancing interoperability of existing toxicogenomics databases.Toxicogenomics is the application of genomic technology to study the adverse effect of toxic substances.The need for alternatives to animal testing has resulted in the expansion of toxicogenomics approaches, data types, and data collections. Much of these data are stored in databases such as diXa, Chemical Effects in Biological Systems (CEBS), DrugMatrix, Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), TG Gates and Connectivity Map. In this interest group we try to better understand the use of toxicogenomics data by researchers and data experts in order to develop an interoperability approach for existing toxicogenomics databases. This will include analysis of case studies from researchers working in the field with the goal of identifying an approach to improve toxicogenomics data sharing, access and analysis.

18. UPC Code for Data
This Interest Group focuses on universal product codes for data.

RDA Plenaries

RDA members meet every six months during plenary conferences while working by email between meetings.

The First Plenary was held in Goteborg, Sweden, 18-20 March 2013

The Second Plenary was held in Washington DC, USA, 16-18 September 2013

The Third Plenary will take place in Dublin, Ireland between 26-28 March 2014.

The fourth plenary will be held 6 months later in the Netherlands.

 It is expected that IODE will join the RDA as an "affiliate member" by the end of 2013.

We encourage you to participate. The Secretariat will look into possibilities to provide travel support for some IODE experts. http://www.rd-alliance.org/

Details

Created on: Wednesday, 18 September 2013 20:27

Last Updated on: Tuesday, 24 September 2013 13:18