[Johannes Keizer]

Decisions

The title of the Interest Group is changed from “Agricultural Data Interoperability” to “Agricultural Data”
The plan to constitute a second working group on global standard vocabularies on Germplasm descriptors is endorsed. Vassilis Protonotarios will liaise with the interested parties to write the case statement
The topic “data policies” will be part of the Agenda of the next face2face meeting in Dublin. Martin Parr will prepare the discussion of the topic
Based on the existing charter and invitation letter will be drafted, which will be send to a group of key persons to invite them to participate in the Agricultural Data – RDA interestgroup. Responsible Johannes Keizer

 
Recording of the  Interest Group Meeting
The break-out session of the Agricultural Data Interest Group of RDA took place on 17/9/2013. There were about 30 participants (list of participants will be available shortly) from various organizations of interest to the Group. The discussion was based on the meeting’s agenda, as follows:
 

Discussion of the group Charter and Goals
Discussion of the “Working Group” Wheat data Interoperability

 

Further topics that could be brought on the agenda or on working group leve;
How to increase participation in the RDA Interest Group
Report on related projects  (agINFRA, agriXchange………)
 How to exploit the possibilities of NSF and Horizon 2020 for data related projects
 Any Other Business

The outcomes of the discussion per agenda item are presented in the following paragraphs:
 
1. Discussion of the IG Group Charter and Goals:
– The scope of the term “agricultural data” should be defined.
– The interoperability between the group and other disciplines should be mentioned and highlighted; for example, in the case of pesticides, toxicology could also provide useful feedback.
– The group should not be limited to interoperability, so this could be omitted from the name of the group. It is expected that the group also covers other aspects, like scalability. The new name could be Agricultural Data – RDA Interest Group
– The involvement of additional organizations should be discussed. Group members responsible for bringing new stakeholders to the group should be defined, along with the proposed approach to be followed. It should be clarified if the effort be split among the group members or is there another plan?
– The role of initiatives/organizations like CIARD should be carefully defined, so that the group’s efforts can be aligned with the work of these organizations.
– Additional revisions were made in the Group’s charter, in order to better reflect the scope of the WG. The revised Charter is available here: https://www.rd-alliance.org/agricultural-data-interoperability-rda-interest-group-charter.html.
 
2. Discussion of the WG Wheat Data Interoperability
There are four types of outcomes, expected to be published by the Group:
– A report of existing standards and recommendations for Wheat Data management
– The Wheat Linked Data Framework (in the form of a cookbook), which aims to involve linked data experts and domain experts , along with other stakeholders.
– A repository of vocabularies and ontologies
– A decision tree for describing/representing data
In all cases, related material and approaches mainly from the related RDA WGs/IGs  but also publicly available will be adapted and adopted.
– Towards achieving interoperability, a registry of the existing standards will need to be created and a first draft of the outcomes should be prepared as soon as possible. The results of the survey which took place in the previous months, as well as additional research on the specific topic will also be used in this direction.
– The approach defined by the Wheat Interoperability WG towards the alignment of the proprietary schemas used by each data provider to standards applied to Semantic Web . It is expected for it to be easily adapted and applied to other important crops, like maize, rice etc. , therefore will provide added value.
– A subset of the CABI thesaurus related to wheat could be available to the group, as one of the standards . Additional standards need to be identified.
– The survey should be forwarded to all potential stakeholders who are working with wheat and could provide substantial feedback on the standards used, data sources etc.
 
3. Further topics for the WG
– Data policies: It is a generic concept, which includes more specific ones, such as data sharing, data management, IPR. All these should be taken into consideration for the work of the Group, and related work from other RDA Groups should be adapted. It was noted that different data sources (e.g. public/private, institutional, national, worldwide; IMF/World Bank etc.) have different data policies, so they could be explored. This item will be discussed in details during the next IG meeting in the 3rd RDA Plenary Meeting in Dublin, Ireland. It would be beneficial for the Group to invite a member of the RDA Interest Group working on the data policies to share experiences in the next IG meeting .
– Germplasm Working Group: A germplasm Working Group should be created in the context of the IG, and work should be done towards enhancing interoperability, achieving standards and enabling data sharing and exposure for the biodiversity community. There should be work towards defining common global germplasm descriptions; this is a request raised in the previous Biodiversity meeting in Rome from Bioversity International.
– Funding options: Funding will be required for the the activities of the group, such as actual work, dissemination etc. Funding may be channeled either from related projects (such as agINFRA in the case of germplasm), related initiatives (e.g. Wheat Initiative) and maybe new projects funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. Since participation of the group members is participatory, only a little time can currently be allocated to the activities of the group.
– Sustainability: Existing business models should be studied in order to ensure sustainability. The example given was that even open data may disappear if triple stores are not financially supported. People often associate open data with being free but at he same time there are costs that are associated with the curation and storage of the data. A fully articulated business proposal has not been generated yet, which could show the effect of opening data and how the linking data benefits agriculture. For this, the advantages of opening databases for currently private systems should be highlighted.
– Data sources: Data sources like Dataverse should be considered, since they have already done steps towards the work of linking and aggregating data and metadata in the agricultural sector.
 
4. Increase participation in the IG
The following options were discussed for increasing the participation of stakeholders in the IG:
–  Webinars could be organized with the help from the FAO AIMS team for the wheat data interoperability group
– The people who might be interested in the IG should be identified and invited to participate. A revised version of the Charter needs to be available for attracting these stakeholders.
– RDA meetings (twice a year) should be exploited and combined with following the advances/outcomes of the related RDA IGs/WGs
– Participation of USDA members should be encouraged . USDA is a major organization and at the heart of the activities of the group.
– The advantages of each data provider to opening up their data should be clearly explained; since in some case data providers have to make a profit out of their work, they will need to know how they will be benefited from opening up their data.
– The approach would be to start from a number of potential partners which are directly accessible and provide them with the advantages of opening up their data; then, additional ones will follow.
– An e-survey to the agricultural field can be developed and circulated to stakeholders in order to help the group find what data issues have been apparent in the past years. The information will be coming directly from the stakeholders. A similar survey has already been completed, but its results have not been exploited yet.
 
5. Report on related projects (agINFRA, agriXchange etc.)
The scope and work done so far in related projects like agINFRA and agriXchange was discussed. 
 
6. Explore possibilities of NSF and Horizon 2020 for data-related projects
– NSF and Horizon 2020 will provide excellent funding opportunities for the work done in the context of the Group, since the activities could be aligned.
– Institutions from all over the world could be considered for participation, if eligible; this will need to be confirmed after studying the eligibility criteria of the new call.
– Major institutions activated in the specific context of Agricultural Data Interoperability, such as the National Agricultural Library (U.S.) should be also considered .
 
7. Any other business
– Developing a user interface for accessing data coming from various sources: Agro-Know Technologies (www.agroknow.gr) offers to develop a finder/micro-site for users to access the data coming from the various related data sources. For this, feedback will be needed from the stakeholders in order for them to provide their ideas on the first draft of the user interface of the finder. This item could be further discussed during the next meeting of the IG. In the meantime, feedback can be collected from expected end-users of such a tool (e.g. researchers) in order to define the requirements, so that a first prototype of the interface and software parts can be deve
Credits to Lisa and  Brian for Notetaking!!   to Vassilis for compiling the notes!!

Discussion