RDA Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) Pre-Plenary meeting, 3-4 April 2017, Barcelona, Spain

The RDA Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) Pre-Meeting will be held on April 3th to 4th, before the 9th RDA Plenary Meeting at the Faculty of Library and Information Science, University of Barcelona. 

The agenda is available at: http://bit.ly/2m8I3BU

Formed in 2013, since its inception the Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) has grown in community strength to over 100 members, becoming one of the RDA’s most prominent Thematic Groups. IGAD is a domain-oriented group working on all issues related to global agriculture data. It represents stakeholders in managing data for agricultural research and innovation, including producing, aggregating and consuming data.

Beyond this IGAD promotes good practices in research with regard data sharing policies, data management plans, and data interoperability, and it is a forum for sharing experience and providing visibility to research and work in agricultural data. The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative supports its partners to join IGAD and participate actively to work on open data, data interoperability and capacity development.

One of IGAD’s main roles is to serve as a platform that leads to the creation of domain-specific Working Groups. To date one successful Working Group has formed under IGAD and four more are in their inception phase:  the Wheat Data Interoperability, the Rice Data Interoperability, Soil Data, AgriSemantics and On-Farm Data Sharing all playing an active role at the most recent RDA 8 in Denver (CO, USA). GODAN is actively promoting the membership of these working groups to its partners and some will function as GODAN working groups.

Till RDA  Plenary Meeting 8

The last IGAD Pre-Meeting took place in Tokyo (Japan) during the RDA P7, and focussed on a wide range of topics within the agricultural research data management area as a preparation for the RDA 7th Plenary Meeting. 50 IGAD members – split into three key discussion groups, came up with concrete plans of action aimed at opening up access to agricultural data – the RDA’s mission. Here’s an overview of what was discussed. During the RDA P8 in Denver (CO, USA) in September 2016, IGAD presented the results of the working groups, and the pre-meeting was postponed to RDA P9 for logistics reasons.

Pre-meeting at RDA Plenary Meeting 9

The next pre-meeting will take place in Barcelona (Spain) before the RDA Plenary Meeting 9, and will provide an opportunity to evaluate how the group has evolved during the last months, what are the latest developments and to focus on research data management and semantics. For that, and following the successful methodology applied at P7, we are organizing a pre-meeting to showcase and discuss in the context of open and research data and with special attention to rice, wheat, other crops, agrisemantics and soil research data.  The RDA IGAD community is ever expanding and adding interesting new topics to its portfolio. At  the P9 pre-meeting, we are excited to invite participants to discuss new topics: capacity development for agriculture research data management, weather climate data and metrics and indicators in agricultural sciences.

The two-day meeting, will include presentations during the first day, related to the topics below, while the second day will focus intensive discussions and interactions. Towards this objective, it is proposed to organize nine discussion groups around the following topics:

• AgriSemantics
• Rice Data and Wheat Data Interoperability
• Other crop Research Data Interoperability
• Soil Data Interoperability
• On-Farm Data Sharing
• Metrics and indicators in agricultural science
• Climate/Weather Data
• Capacity development in the context of research data in agriculture

The conclusions of this pre-meeting will be brought to the 9th RDA Plenary Meeting at the Agricultural Data Interest Group Session on Wednesday, 5th April from 11:30 to 13:00

To confirm your registration please contact Imma.Subirats@fao.org or karna.wegner@fao.org. 

Please note that lunch and coffee of both days are covered.