Cataluña Conquaire!

09 Apr 2017

Jochen Schirrwagen and Vid presented Conquaire at the ninth RDA plenary in sunny Barcelona last Friday but first, here is a brief recap from day one!

A pre-conf welcome session for RDA Newcomers was scheduled the evening before the plenary, followed by a networking cocktail for newcomers, EU grant holders and industry participants to mingle.

On day one, 5th April 2017 the RDA 9th plenary meeting session was opened at 9 AM with keynotes and introductions by the RDA Chair, RDA Plenary Coordinator and the outgoing Secretary General. Post the coffee break the WG/IG/BoF Working Meetings started. The programme page lists an array of interesting research discussions related to research infrastructure and community activities aiming to reduce the technical barriers to data sharing and management. Each session was conducted for 90 minutes but with such an interesting array of programme(s), it was hard to choose a single session to attend from multiple parallel sessions.

The IG Domain Repositories session “Introduction to domain protocols for RDM” by Peter Doom and Patrick Aerts discussed Data Management Plans (DMP) that have become mandatory for funders and is now considered a research tool to establish policies on research data management for research labs. The session discussed the importance of a domain oriented approach for DMPs and the nedd to organize communities for standards.

Post lunch, the next session I attended was the ‘IG Education and Training on handling of research data RDA 9th Plenary meeting’ where Yuri did an introduction on establishing cooperation between projects in the EU and the EOSC pilot, the FOSTER plus project and implementation of open science in H2020. They also spoke about the CODATA WG summer school on Research Data Science, aka, DataTrieste 2016.

After the coffee break, I attended the “IG Data Versioning” session that was about scientific reproducibility and versioning procedures and established best practices for scientific software inorder to enable reproducibility of scientific results.

On day-2, 6th April 2017, the RDA plenary meets began with a “Women in RDA” breakfast from 08:00 - 09:30 AM and it was fun to meet and chat with women from different countries. Thereafter, I attended the “IG Active Data Management Plans” meeting that sought to define, develop and test machine-actionable DMPs. They presented a summary of their workshops and conclusions from CERN, IDCC and other relevant workshops. The presentations outlined specifications for stakeholders, the scope of working groups and next steps.

Next was the “IG Long tail of research data”, a session on “Priorities and challenges for managing the long tail of research data”. It addressed specific challenges in managing the long tail of research data. They described how organizations can identify priorities and how the community must create standards for RDM of long tail data.

Post lunch, it was the Data Champion Communities meeting on “Towards effective research data training delivery: creating a researcher-led data champion community” where attendees were introduced to the Data Champions project at Cambridge University. The discussion touched upon similar initiatives at other institutions and required actions for an RDA group with outcomes. The second day ended with the Array Database Assessment WG presenting their recommendations & outputs.

On friday, 7th April 2017, the final day of the RDA plenary, my first session was on the working group Data Description Registry Interoperability (DDRI) with a demo of the Neo4J that fetched the ORCID_ID, researcher data, etc…

From 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM it was the presentation from IG Repository Platforms for Research Data where I presented “Conquaire: enabling Git based research data quality control for institutional repositories” which was very well-received - the Q&A session had interesting questions. Also heard other presenters speak about their experiences with research data repositories in their institution and it was a good learning curve to understand their experiences with selecting, implementing, and using specific research data repository platforms/products in various domains.

At 12:30 PM the closing plenary session started with an announcement that the 10th plenary with the theme “Better Data, Better Decisions (BD2)” would be held from 19-21 September 2017 in Montréal at the University of Montréal and Research Data Canada, Canada.