Completed

The group held a BoF session at Plenary 9, Barcelona, April 2017.

From the session description:

*La version francais suite*

There are currently few forums for research funders engaged in the open research and data management space to discuss their unique challenges, perspectives and opportunities. Creating a forum for research funders to initiate or further data-related discussions could result in lasting benefits for the research community (increased coordination, standardization and support) and the funders themselves in terms of avoiding duplication of efforts and building on existing expertise and resources.

The increasing availability of research data and its evolving role as a first class scientific output in the scholarly communication requires a better understanding of and the possibility to assess data quality, which in turn can be described as conformance of data properties to data usability or fitness for use. These properties are multifaceted and cover various aspects related to data objects, access services, and data management processes such as the level of annotation, curation, peer review, and citability or machine readability of datasets. Moreover, the compliance  of a data repository or data center providing datasets - for example with certification requirements - could serve as a useful proxy. Firstly, a concept of data fitness requires assessment of quality criteria to be included as well as the weighing of each of those criteria. The process should preferably lead to the development  of a corresponding metric. Secondly, we want to find effective ways to expose and communicate this metric, for e.g. by using a labelling or tagging system whereby different usability levels are made explicit.

The Group completed its outputs and recommendations in April 2019 and thus completed its work as a group towards the initial Case Statement.   The outputs of this Working Group are considered and included in the efforts of both the FAIR Data Maturity Model WG and the FAIRsFAIR Project.

The Internet now connects data, compute resources and software from globally distributed resources in real time. Where on planet Earth these resources are geographically located is irrelevant, but to enable online access to them, there is a rising need for programmatic access to both data, and to software to process data across institutional, domain and national boundaries. This requires the development of standardized machine-to-machine interfaces that can loosely couple data and software through agreed formats, interfaces, vocabularies and ontologies, preferably across multiple domains. The complexity of these online infrastructures require that they are built by much wider communities, through effective cooperation and governance, to enable new and innovative forms of interdisciplinary science from globally accessible data stores. 

In a field where the amount and the data sources increase exponentially, it becomes critical to find efficient solutions at a community level to address problems such as storage, indexing, metadata, sharing, or analysis. The global objectives of this Interest Group will be to explore and discuss the challenges for management, efficient analysis and dissemination of large and diverse datasets generated by the weather, climate and air quality communities.