[Dimitris Koureas]

Dear chairs and members of the Marine Data Harmonization IG,
During the previous RDA plenaries it gradually became obvious that the environment-related Interest and Working Groups share concerns and face similar challenges regarding the lifecycle of Life data.
Many of our urgent societal challenges require the effective cross-fertilisation of people, data and processes across multiple biodiversity and environmental disciplines. In order to address these overarching challenges we will need to promote a targeted dialogue within existing fora and use these discussions to build the road-mapping documents that will drive our efforts in the years to come.
RDA provides a unique opportunity, where existing Working and Interest Groups can talk on shared issues and identify common solutions. In this context we propose to organise a joint meeting of all key RDA Working and Interest Groups within the environmental cluster.
The Biodiversity Data Integration (BDI) Interest Group proposed the organisation, for the first time, of a joint session between the following WG and IG, as an opportunity to enhance experience trasfer and improve coordination:
– WG BioSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards & databases in life sciences
– WG Metadata Standards Directory
– WG Wheat Data Interoperability
– IG Agriculture Data Interoperability
– IG Biodiversity Data Integration
– IG ELIXIR Bridging Force
– IG Geospatial
– IG Marine Data Harmonization
– IG Metadata
We are happy to announce that this proposal was accepted by the RDA P5 organisers and we will have the opportunity to organise a 45 min plenary session, as a joint meeting of the above Groups.
We see this as a unique opportunity to emphasise on environmental challenges and initiate a fruitfull dialogue between scientific and technological Groups within RDA.
We would like to have 4 or 5 talks that will aim to touch one of the following topics (non-exchaustive list):
1. Name services and their impact in bringing together heterogeneous data
2. Common biodiversity/environmental metadata standards
3. Bio-ontologies: Curation and integration challenges
4. e-infrastructures interoperability and environmental service provision integration
5. Integration of distributed e-infrastructures: Redundancy and complementarity issues
I would also like to invite all the chairs of the Group to express their interest in co-chairing this session.
Could you please send your suggestions by Thursday 22 Jan?
Kind regards,
Dimitris
—
Dr Dimitrios Koureas
Biodiversity Data Integration Interest Group, Chair
Biodiversity Information Standards-TDWG, Exec. member
Dept of Life Sciences
Natural History Museum London
SW7 5BD, UK

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