Meeting title 
Research Data Graph
 
Collaborative session notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-MTv3BlP3RB4zMlBCXCOdtONMIktmGEoCtWpmRxo1ig/edit
 
Meeting Location: Commonwealth D
 
Meeting objectives
The research data graph connects research data with other research activities, including but not limited to publications, software, people, institutions, grants and funders. There is great interest by a number of organizations to contribute to and/or consume this research data graph. The general architecture and main use cases are well understood thanks in particular to the work by the RDA Data Description Registry Interoperability (DDRI) Working Group. The RDA/WDS Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) Working Group has added significantly to our understanding of the subset of the research data graph connecting data and literature. Both working groups have done extensive work on implementation of services and community adoption.
Both the DDRI and now Scholix working groups are now in maintenance mode, but other projects continue to work on the research data graph, including the OpenAIRE scholarly communication graph and the FREYA PID Graph.
The goal of the session is to provide an overview of current research data graph activities and discuss potential collaboration opportunities in the context of RDA going forward. The session organizers invite all RDA community members with an interest in and potentially ongoing work on the research data graph to attend. Potential outcomes include a summary document describing the current state of activities and common understanding, and the formation of a research data graph RDA Interest Group or Working Group.
 
Meeting agenda
* Introduction: round of introductions, goals of the BoF
* Data Description Registry Interoperability (DDRI) Working Group (Amir Aryani)
* Scholarly Link Exchange Working Group (Wouter Haak)
* OpenAIRE scholarly communication graph (Paolo Manghi)
* FREYA PID Graph (Martin Fenner)
* Other research data graph activities (TBD)
* Open discussion of key issues, potential synergies, and the role RDA can play
* Next steps
 
Short description
The RDA Data Description Registry Interoperability (DDRI) Working Group did foundation work on describing the research data graph. The group has continued its work while in maintenance mode and has not only built impressive distributed infrastructure to support the research data graph, but has also gained a lot of experience on the practical challenges of building a large research data graph, and how to overcome them. One of the session co-organizers is a co-chair of the DDRI working group. 

The RDA/WDS Scholarly Link Exchange (Scholix) Working Group (which evolved from the RDA/WDS Data Publishing Services WG), co-chaired by several of the session co-organizers, has published a standard protocol and metadata schema for exchanging links between research data and scholarly literature, has built infrastructure that uses this protocol and metadata schema, and is working on adoption by the data repositories and publisher communities. Many of the lessons learned can also be applied to other links between research activities, and the working group is interested to explore the relative benefits of an approach focussing on research data and literature vs. a more generic protocol and metadata schema that can be applied to a broader range of relations between research activities.
The OpenAIRE scholarly communication graph builds on the open research infrastructure built by OpenAIRE that collects information about a broad variety of research outputs, focussing on European institutions and researchers.
Work on the PID graph in the EC-funded FREYA project started 12 months ago and focusses on building the research data graph using persistent identifiers, with the goal of proving production grade infrastructure supporting the PID Graph.
 
Additional links to informative material
* https://rd-alliance.org/groups/data-description-registry-interoperability.html
* http://researchgraph.org/
* Most recent Research Graph publication: http://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.99
* https://rd-alliance.org/groups/rdawds-publishing-data-services-wg.html
* https://rd-alliance.org/groups/rdawds-scholarly-link-exchange-scholix-wg
* http://www.scholix.org/
* Relevant Scholix publication https://doi.org/10.1045/january2017-burton