SAEON attends launch of the Research Data Alliance

The launch and first plenary of the Research Data Alliance took place in Gothenburg, Sweden in April. View larger version Issues such as meta-data, semantic interoperability and standards were highlighted at the event. View larger version

SAEON attended the launch and first plenary of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) in Gothenburg, Sweden on behalf of local stakeholders in Dirisa (the Data-Intensive Research Initiative for South Africa) and the ICSU World Data System.

The RDA aims to facilitate data sharing and re-use across different science domains, and has been promoted strongly by some of the larger funding agencies (US, UK, EU and Australia). The usual emphasis on meta-data, semantic interoperability and standards is self-evident, but there are some interesting new concepts emerging from the workgroup candidates that were identified at the launch event:

'Author' concept

There is widespread support for a ‘type’ registry to underpin the growing importance of ‘Linked Open Data’ and the semantic web. By way of an example - an increasingly linked data landscape for research outputs needs the concept of an author of a journal article or data publication, and for the linking to work properly, the identifier for the author needs to be unique.

Increasingly, data management systems are providing us with the unique identifiers, but to date there has been no way to determine if the concept of ‘author’ already exists. RDA aims to create a master directory of such concepts (‘types’), and the relationships between them. In essence, they will be creating a meta-model of how the world of science works.

Data publication and citation

CoDATA has been seeking a consensus in respect of the process of data publication and citation for some time, and has recently reached a point where there is broad agreement on how this should function and what the roles of scientists, data centres, publishers and citation indices are in this respect. The RDA has identified this as an important workgroup and is expected to extend the consensus beyond the traditional CoDATA domain of physical and biological sciences.

There are many workgroups (some of them candidates at this point), as well as interest groups that may benefit local participants while contributing a local view to a global initiative. Please have a look at the workgroups on the RDA site and register your interest!

SAEON will remain involved through the World Data System, which is formally collaborating in the ‘Contextual MetaData’ and ‘Publishing Data’ working groups.