IGAD Community of Practice - Proposal
The Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) came to life in Gothenburg (Göteborg, Sweden) in 2013 at the beginning of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and has since grown to include over 260 registered members, from across continents. IGAD is a domain-oriented interest group working on all issues related to food and agricultural data. It represents stakeholders in managing data for food and agricultural research and innovation, including producing, aggregating and consuming data.
Beyond this, IGAD promotes good practices and RDA Recommendations in the research domain, including data sharing policies, data management plans, and data interoperability. As a forum for sharing experiences and providing visibility to research and work in food and agricultural data, IGAD has become a space for networking and blending ideas related to data management and interoperability. It also provides fertile ground to reach out and promote projects among other international organizations and institutions working in food and agricultural research and innovation. On a logistical level, one of IGAD’s chief roles is to serve as a platform that leads to the creation of domain-specific Working Groups.
For more information on why IGAD should transition to become the “Improving Global Agricultural Data” Community of Practice, view the “Objectives” section of our proposal. Benefits and alignment with RDA goals are described below under the Value Proposition Section 2. User scenario(s) or use case(s) the CoP wishes to address.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
 IGAD COP proposal.pdf | 663.78 KB |
| IGAD CoP Support Letter -- Syngenta-signed.pdf | 83.79 KB |
| Godan signed letterhead.pdf | 333.68 KB |
| Rothamsted IGAD CoP Support Letter.pdf | 173.15 KB |
Author: Helen Thompson
Date: 03 Jul, 2021
Federation University Australia, through the Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation is leading a number of national and international initiatives to improve the emergent agricultural data ecosystem which is largely ad hoc and unstructured, resulting in much of the potential value of agricultural data for industry, policy and research not being fully realised.
Specific examples include the Agricultural Research Federation (AgReFed) supported by the Australian Research Data Commons; Visualising Australasia's Soils (VAS) supported by the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils, Online Farm Trials in partnership with the Grains Research and Development Corporation and the Better Data for Better Decisions Constellation supported by the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre.
Federation University strongly supports the formation of an RDA Community of Practice for Agricultural Data. This would accelerate the bringing together of practitioners from academia, government, and industry to more rapidly advance FAIR agricultural data and important interoperability-related topics and use cases.
We look forward to actively participating in the CoP when formed.
Assoc Prof Helen Thompson
Director, Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation