Call for Participation

Research Data Alliance 8^th Plenary Program

BOF: Software for Better Description and Retrieval of Online Scientific Data

Thursday, September 15, 2016. Breakout Session 3, 4:00–5:30 p.m.

This BOF will introduce a new dimension to RDA breakout sessions—demonstrations of software to aid better access to online experimental data.

Building infrastructure through strategies of interconnection (not an architecture)

Dear friends,

It still feels like yesterday when I joined the RDA efforts in late 2012. It is hard to believe that four years have already passed. However, looking back, the amount of work that we managed to complete together in an international context is quite staggering. As I write this RDA has already produced 12 Recommendations, of which half are currently endorsed*.

It’s true that RDA does many things that are of great pragmatic value – developing standards, detailing best practices, supporting the nitty-gritty technical work to make data shareable.  But behind or beyond those very valuable missions, I see RDA, through its Interest and Working Groups, as doing nothing less than rethinking what data is.  Thanks to the Data Fabric Interest Group, for example, it’s now possible to understand that data is less of a thing and more of a pattern of distributed but interwoven things, along with the work and technologies that weaves them toge

The Archives and Records professionals Interest Group first came together as a Birds of a Feather session at Plenary 6 in Paris, September 2015. Although existing RDA groups were already providing a forum for information professionals (for example the Libraries for Research Data Group) and for those interested in historical data (such as the Data Rescue Interest Group), we felt that a new Interest Group would be welcome for two reasons.