By Alexandra Delipalta, 18th May 2023

The RDA/EOSC Future team is launching a series of spotlights to showcase the grantees, their work and experience.

Find out more about the RDA/EOSC Future grants

This week we spoke to Sarah Barber and Yuriy Marykovskiy from the project Recommendations for FAIR data sharing in wind energy

Can you tell us about the origins of the idea behind the project? (who/when/how did the group of people behind the project come together)

Sarah: The idea came about due to our participation in IEA Wind Task 43: Digitalisation, part of the IEA Technology Collaboration Programme. Numerous surveys and interviews with people working in the wind energy sector showed the strong need for tools and guidelines for helping people to share data. The call for grants was therefore a perfect opportunity for us to start applying some of the RDA outputs to wind energy applications.

How has the project plan (and perhaps the idea) evolved during execution?

Sarah: The project plan hasn’t changed. However, we have tried to use our monthly metadata webinar series to encourage collaboration between knowledge engineering experts from RDA-related activities and domain experts. This activity wasn’t in the project plan.

Have there been any surprises (new opportunities or challenges)?

Sarah: Being part of the programme has made me more aware of other relevant funding opportunities, which is nice!

Can you tell us more about the team and how it has evolved? New skills/learning acquired, working methods shaped by the RDA/EOSC environment?

Sarah: The project has helped my team focus its activities more. We have learnt how to make a start with improving data sharing in the wind energy sector; namely by applying the RDA FAIR Data Maturity Model to the data sets we would like to share, and then by applying existing controlled vocabularies and ontologies. The project has inspired us to submit a further funding proposal aiming to develop an ontology hosting portal for wind energy applications.

Are there any lessons learnt that you could share with the community?

Sarah: I think this will come out at the end of our project, once the FAIR data guidelines have been applied to our pilot data sharing project and we have assessed the results.

How was your experience at the RDA 20th Plenary Meeting?

Yuriy: Overall, very positive experience. A lot of possibilities for networking and a very responsive and open community. My only wish for more engagement with domain experts (researchers and engineers), especially from technical sciences domain. My feeling is that this group was under-represented.