IG Agricultural Data (IGAD) RDA 8th Plenary meeting

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25 May 2016 2646 reads

https://rd-alliance.org/groups/agriculture-data-interest-group-igad.html

Panel session

Panellists will present the current challenges on research data management, in some cases with examples of semantic solutions and institutional policies to support it. 

 

In an effort to encourage discussion and future RDA collaboration, Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library will highlight specific use-cases that are presenting interesting problems within the International and National Agricultural Data sector, and encourage conversation around possible solutions. Areas of focus include metadata standards for USDA agencies to enable interoperability between government and academic data, further development and testing of geographic ontology (GeoSkos), and agriculture data focused education to fill gaps in current knowledge and practice.

  • Cristina Perez, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Data Management and Dissemination at IFPRI: Opportunity and challenges

Managing and disseminating data is an important step in achieving IFPRI’s vision of world without hunger and malnutrition; these tasks do not come without challenges. Even though many researchers in the institute think about long-term preservation of their data, the demands of publication output overwhelm long-term considerations of data curation and dissemination. Researchers do not have time to devote for preparing data, developing data description and documentation. This is where the Communications and Knowledge Management (CKM) Division steps in to help.

Currently, 221 research datasets from IFPRI are openly available and easily accessible for public use. CKM is heavily involved in helping researchers with curating and publishing datasets as public goods. The support ranges from assisting researchers in developing a data management plan/strategies from the beginning of proposal phase as well as during research implementation; helping researchers to anonymize, curate, and publish datasets with proper documentation; connecting datasets with other products of scholarships; and using multiple avenues of communication to attract attention to the data.

AgGateway is a non-profit consortium of over 200 organizations, primarily in the private sector, dedicated to the implementation of data standards for interoperability in agriculture. AgGateway has operated for over 10 years in supply-chain processes. For the last 5 it has also been active in field operations, where it has multiple active projects: SPADE (interoperability in field operations, grain handling and asset management), PAIL (interoperability in irrigation and observations & measurements), and ADAPT (implementation of a common object model and format conversion framework). All of these have strong semantic interoperablity components, including the creation of variable registries, reference data APIs, and leveraging of existing controlled vocabularies.

Group chair serving as contact person Imma Subirats Coll