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Standards

RDA Recommendations and Outputs are the technical and social infrastructure solutions developed by RDA Working Groups or Interest Groups that enable data sharing, exchange, and interoperability.  These Outputs have an important impact in two areas:  solving problems, and incorporation and/or adoption in infrastructure environments by individuals, projects, and organisations. And as an organisation, the RDA’s goal is to expand awareness and adoption of these Outputs, and hence their impact, within all regions of the world.

The RDA is not a standards development organisation (SDO) but is designed to have standard like processes for production and endorsement of its recommendations. Indeed, the RDA processes are designed based on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In the past RDA worked with SDOs and similar organisations so that RDA Recommendations can either get a fast track to becoming standards, be incorporated in or contribute to common goals and activities, and overall foster adoption and build trust and engagement in new user communities. 

RDA ICT Technical Specifications

In 2017, the RDA was approved, by the Multi Stakeholder platform, as an organisation that can submit technical specifications / standards for approval. Leveraging the clear and transparent RDA process for producing and endorsing its outputs as “Recommendations”, three waves of outputs (12 in total) from the RDA groups were submitted to the European Multi-Stakeholders Platform on ICT Standardisation (MSP – E02758) to be recognised as ICT Technical Specifications.

The European Commission saw this as a very positive outcome and encouraged the RDA to put more Recommendations through this process. This standardisation process has also targeted the robustness and openness of the RDA process,  positively evaluated by the MSP as a pre-condition for the ICT Technical Specifications identification process.  More details on this and the RDA recommendations that have been approved and are currently in the evaluation process can be viewed in the slide set.

First set of RDA Recommendations approved as ICT Technical Specifications and published in the Official Journal of the European Union 20 July 2017:

• TS1 Data Foundation & Terminology Model

• TS2 PID Information Types API- Persistent Identifier Type Registry

• TS3 Data Type Registries Model

• TS4 Practical Policies recommendations

Second set of RDA Recommendations approved as ICT Technical Specifications in December 2017:

• TS5 RDA Data Citation of Evolving Data

• TS6 RDA Data Description Registry Interoperability Model

• TS7 RDA RDA CoreTrustSeal Data Repository  Requirements

• TS8 RDA RDA/WDS Workflows for Research Data Publishing Model