RDA Working on

The Earth, space, and environmental science communities are developing, through multiple international efforts, both general and domain-specific leading practices for data management, infrastructure development, vocabularies, and common data/digital services. This Interest Group will work towards coordinating and harmonizing these efforts to reduce possible duplication, increase efficiency, share use cases, and promote partnerships and adoption in the community.

A strategic element to maintaining a competitive advantage in research is by focussing energies in areas of innovation, which is facilitated by sharing of resources and support of inter-disciplinary collaborations at the national and international levels. The primary impediment to this resource sharing and collaboration is the lack of an effective FIM (Federated Identity Management) ecosystem.

This IG started with a BoF session at the 10th RDA Plenary in Montreal in 2017. The minutes and powerpoint presentation of this session are available below. 

The IG Charter was approved in August 2018 and can be found below as well.

At the 12th Plenary in Gaborone the IG hosted a succesful session, which was well attended.

Presentations an minutes will be shared  shortly.

Given the increased value of research data as a national research asset, many countries are establishing national services to provide data services, coordination and support for research data storage, management, publication, reuse and sharing. The peers for such national data services are other national data services, and this interest group is intended as a peer support forum to exchange ideas and share experiences. The desired outcome is to increase efficiency for the individual operators of national data services and to promote a more coherent joined-up, informal federation cooperative of such services.

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.

Context and purpose

Introduction

The Research Data Architectures in Research Institutions Interest Group is primarily concerned with technical architectures for managing research data within universities and other multi-disciplinary research institutions. It provides insight into the approaches being taken to the development and operation of such architectures and their success or otherwise in enabling good practice.

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) are rapidly becoming important tools for data capture across many Scientific domains, as well as within commercial industry.  sUAS have the potential to transform how data are captured in many arenas by, offering higher temporal and spatial resolutions, with less impact on the environments being monitored, and access to new locations and parameters.

Software source code plays a critical role in all fields of modern research, where source code is written and developed to address a variety of needs, like cleaning, processing and visualising data.

Software source code is a necessary component for research reproducibility and reusability. 

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.