The RDA Plenary Adoption and Outputs session

From a domain focused marketplace at P14 to the research data lifecycles at P15

The RDA plenary 15 Adoption & Outputs session will demonstrate RDA’s wide variety of adoptable (and adopted) Outputs & Recommendations, which were developed to address the numerous challenges experienced by the international data community. Organised around the six main research data lifecycle themes, working and interest group chairs, adopters and RDA grant project leaders will share their expertise in developing, implementing and adopting these Recommendations. The session will also enable attendees with experience in the development of related solutions to share the results of their work. Structured similarly to the format used at Plenary 14 in Helsinki, the session will have a marketplace feel, enabling attendees to visit the data life cycle “markets” most relevant to them and engage with the RDA representatives for those areas to gain a better understanding of the RDA Recommendations that compliment those markets, learn next steps in implementing those solutions in their own projects, and/or sharing information about work you’ve been involved with that could compliment or enhance RDA’s Recommendations. In this news-item we look back on the P14 adoption & outputs session and invite you to join co-chairs, adopters and use-case project leads at the P15 edition.

Looking back on the RDA P14 Adoption and Outputs session

On 25 October 2019, at the 14th Plenary meeting of the Research Data Alliance in Helsinki, the RDA Secretariat together with RDA Europe 4.0 members organised the Plenary 14 Adoption and Outputs session. This time, the session specifically showcased solutions for individual research domains. The RDA community has produced more than 30solutions to research data challenges, for which over 100 cases of adoption have been documented. Whether your challenge is social or technical, you can freely use the Recommendations and Outputs produced. For Plenary 14, the revamped Adoption and Outputs session format aimed to give visibility to disciplinary approaches supported by RDA while providing a great way to network and speak to the discipline drivers: discipline-focused Working and Interest Groups, adopters and promoters of the RDA Recommendations and Outputs, and domain-specific Ambassadors.   

Six Research Domain Networking Areas

Domain Ambassadors and Experts pitched the six research domain inspired networking areas (Agriculture, Climate and Earth Sciences, Engineering, Health, Social Sciences and Humanities, and Sustainable Development Goals) that were set up in the main Plenary meeting room. In each area, Working and Interest Group co-chairs, adopters, and domain ambassadors told participants all about how RDA Recommendations and Outputs advance data access and re-use in their related research domains. Participants engaged in face to face conversations with the group chairs, ambassador and adopters and learned about what they are doing, shared their own experiences and addressed challenges directly with the authors of the RDA solutions. Completing the six research domain areas, the domain agnostic area showcased a series of groups and RDA outputs that were applicable to more than one of the domains and encouraged participants to explore how these could benefit their disciplines.

As a co-chair of the Agrisemantics WG, I really appreciated the time spent at the booth. The mood was more conducive to informal discussions and it allowed us to meet new people interested in our topic, exchange email addresses, and get feedback on the WG work and recommendations. Sophie Aubin (INRA) co-chair Agrisemantics WG 

RDA supported with this presentation format an effective communication platform which really grouped  interested people for an exchange of ideas, open and fruitful discussion. As research data infrastructure facilitator, we need on the one hand the broad requirements of the scientist as data provider, and on the other the crucial question on the technical environment as well as our open software solution for further iteration processes. Chris Schubert, CTO/IT Director at Climate Change Centre Austria

An overview of the networking areas

Agriculture

The RDA ambassador for Agriculture Caterina Caracciolo gave an overview of the RDA outputs in agriculture that touch upon domain-specific data, metadata schemas, semantic interoperability, facilitation and capacity development by the working and interest groups present at the agricultural area. 

• Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) 
• Wheat Data Interoperability
• Rice Data Interoperability
• AgriSemantics
• Capacity Development for Agricultural Data
• Soil WG 

The networking in the agricultural area focused on specific questions about the implementation of the outputs produced:

• Wheat Data Interoperability Recommendations
• 39 Hints to Facilitate the Use of Semantics for Data on Agriculture and Nutrition
• Capacity Development for Agriculture Data WG Case Statement

All presentations and resources of the agricultural area are available here.  

Climate and Earth Sciences

The Climate and Earth Sciences adoption booth included presentations from the following Groups and adoption stories: 

• CCCA Subset & Dynamic Data Citation Service, Chris Schubert  
• Data Terra Research Infrastructure (method), Dr Francoise Genova  
•  ESIP/RDA Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences IG, Lesley Wyborn, Shelley Stall  
• Data Citation WG, Andreas Rauber 
• Metadata Standards Directory WG, Rebecca Koskela  
• Data Type Registries WG Tobias Weigel  
• RDA/WDS Publishing Data Workflows WG, Fiona Murphy  
• Data Discovery Paradigms Interest Group, Mingfang Wu 

Presentations can be found here. 

Social Sciences and Humanities

Rene van Horik, RDA Europe Ambassador for the Humanities, introduced key challenges related to SSH data as well as the RDA groups and outputs helping to address these issues. The Social Sciences and Humanities adoption booth included presentations and opportunities to meet the following groups and adopters of RDA outputs:

• Social Science Research Data Interest Group 
• Linguistics Data Interest Group 
• CoreTrustSeal adoption: Digital Repository of Ireland
• CoreTrustSeal adoption: Slovenian Social Science Data Archives 

All presentations of the RDA for SSH booth can be found here.

Engineering

Ana Slavec, the RDA EU Ambassador for Engineering / Renewable Materials introduced the Engineering area with an overview of data challenges in Engineering.  The groups present at the booths :

• Research Data Management in Engineering IG 
• Persistent Identification of Instruments WG 
• International Materials Data Registries WG 
• RDA/CODATA Materials Data, Infrastructure & Interoperability IG 
• Physical Samples and Collections in the Research Data Ecosystem IG 

All presentations of the RDA for engineering booth can be found here. 

Sustainable Development Goals

To highlight the multidisciplinary potential and social impact of the work of RDA, the Adoption session was in fact opened with a presentation detailing how RDA objectives and activities intersect with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The presentation and short discussion brought to light a few key opportunities going forward: 

• How can we better align and coordinate CODATA and RDA activities? And consider more joint WGs?
• Leverage expertise and capacity in RDA WGs and IGs to address global challenges and SDGs
• Provide pre-integrated solutions as an extension to existing adoption activities?
• Challenge “general purpose” WGs to engage with domain WGs and IGs, formulate and implement pilot projects in collaboration with CODATA and other organisations
• Align RDA Plenary themes with one or more global challenges and SDGs
• Strong interest in this for P15 “Data for Real-World Impact”

 

Furthermore, a booth coordinated by the RDA Europe Ambassador for the SDGs, Ingvill Mochmann, has allowed participants to the session to get more familiar with the progress made in this direction, future plans and express interest in the Interest Group  on SDGs.

Health and Bioinformatics

The health and bioinformatics networking area was introduced by Anthony Juehne. He addressed how we can ensure all stages of data collection and preparation within the scientific compendium are fully transparent and appropriately accessible to achieve reproducibility?  Recommendations & Outputs, adoption and ongoing work highlighted here were:

• Reproducible Health Data Services WG
• Scalable Dynamic Data Citation
• Cedar adoption use-case

The presentation is available here.

Domain agnostic

The Digital Curation Centre’s Ryan O’Connor gave the introduction for the domain agnostic (AKA multidisciplinary solutions) booth, providing a brief outline of the challenges faced by those looking to develop guidelines applicable across research domains. These included:

• How best can domain agnostic Recommendations and Outputs be applied across a range of research fields?
• What issues do we face in keeping domain agnostic Recommendations and Outputs up-to-date and relevant?
• How can we effectively communicate results of adoption to specialist and non-specialist audiences?

 

The slides used from the opening introduction are available here and spcific presentations are linked in the list below:  

• Adoption Project - 23 Things Revisited: Field Guides To Research Data Management: Dr Mijke Jetten

• FAIRSharing Registry Working Group: Prof Susanna-Assunta Sansone 

• Adoption Story - The RDA CoreTrustSeal adoption story across domains and regions (CSIRO): Kathryn Unsworth 

• RDA/WDS Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) Working Group: Wouter Haak

• Adopting the Output of Data Type Registry Working Group, Kernel Info Type, and PID4Instruments by ePIC: Dr Ulrich Schwardmann

As is to be expected in a multidisciplinary context, the presentations at the booth featured input from projects and RDA Groups with a wide variety of focuses, from the certification of a repository, a model for linking scholarly publications, to the adoption of an RDA Supporting Output.

Call for Papers CODATA Data Science Journal 

Call for Papers CODATA Data Science Journal 

The 8th area of the Outputs and Adoption session presented the CODATA Data Science Journal RDA special collection, an excellent opportunity to increase visibility of your RDA output and adoption. The journal is looking for articles on:

• The results (RDA Recommendations, Supporting Outputs or Other Outputs) produced by an Interest or Working Group.
• The description of an Adoption Case outlining how a specific recommendation or output has been implemented in a given use case.

Submit your paper now! 

The RDA Europe 4.0 project will support the publication of a maximum of 30 articles. The Call for Papers is open to all interested applicants regardless of their geographical provenance. 

Join us at P15

Join co-chairs of Working and Interest Groups and Adopters during the Plenary 15 Adoption & Outputs session on 19 March at 9.00-11.00, shaped around the research data lifecycle.