IG Established

The vision of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is that “researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.” The Mission of RDA is that it “builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data.”

Increasingly researchers who are not co-located are seeking to work dynamically together at various scales from the local to global using the internet to share data, models, workflows, best practice, publications, management and administration of their research etc. The Virtual Research Environments Interest Group (VRE-IG) seeks to build the required technical bridges, skills and social communities that enable global sharing and processing of data across technologies, disciplines and countries through the creation of shared online virtual environments. As these individual VREs grow, inevitably they need to also connect with major national research infrastructures.

The goal of the VRE-IG is to identify the technical issues to and - where known - share solutions that enable online access to data required to address issues that can range from local challenges (which are also potentially of direct relevance to researchers in other geographical areas or other research domains), to the research grand challenges currently being faced by society on global issues, e.g., societal impacts of climate change; sustainable cities; and environmentally sensitive utilisation of the scarce resources of our planet.

This IG starter out as a Working Group, to explore issues related to scientific research data sets that contains human subject information, as well as related datasets that have the potential to be combined in a way that can expose private information. The goal of the group is to develop a framework for how researchers and repositories should appropriately manage human-subject datasets, to develop a metadata set to describe the privacy-related aspects of research datasets, and to build awareness of the privacy implications of research data sharing.

The proposed Interest Group on “Health Data” (HD-IG) is a long-term initiative in the framework of RDA. It follows a rather successful BoF Session during the 6^th RDA Plenary Meeting in Paris, which was attended by over 35 researchers and professionals from diverse backgrounds, who discussed several relevant issues, expressed significant interest in forming the proposed Interest Group, and helped shape its focus as presented here.

The proposed Global Water Information Interest Group (GWIIG) will serve as a platform leading to formation of RDA working group; as a venue for communication among RDA WGs and IGs focused on both technical eInfrastructure aspects (e.g. brokering; metadata and catalogs, dynamic data citation) and on related research domains (e.g. geosciences, agriculture, biodiversity); and as a coordination mechanism across a wide group of water information stakeholders, in particular those not previously involved in the OGC/WMO water standardization work.

Objectives