VRE4EIC at the RDA IG Collaboration Meeting

12 - 13 December 2016 / Washington RDA 6th WG/IG Collaboration meeting - Assembling the Pieces: Connecting Outputs with Each Other and with Domain Adoption

RDA (Research Data Alliance) has a series of biennial meetings of the Group Chairs – commonly known as the coordination meeting.  Each meeting has a theme and the group chairs discuss this theme from their particular viewpoints.  The meeting in December at Gaithersburg was hosted by NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology).  The topic was 'Assembling the Pieces: Connecting Outputs with Each Other and with Domain Adoption’.  Keith Jeffery was invited by the meeting organiser to give the initial presentation which concerned how to concentrate and coordinate the efforts of the groups using the e-RIs (e-Research Infrastructures) as a focus since most researchers are somehow concerned with a research infrastructure (at least in Europe).  The presentation caused extensive discussion.  Subsequent sessions discussed the outputs and links between various groups – both infrastructure (IT) groups and domain-specific groups concerned with particular domains of research.

It was agreed that the next meeting should try to ‘map’ which RDA outputs from the infrastructure groups  are used by which domain groups and listing the requirements of the domain groups (at the level of ‘citation’, ‘interoperability’, ‘curation’ i.e. at a higher level than individual groups of RDA) leading to a plan to provide the required services.  The emerging need for VREs (Virtual Research Environments) was recognised and the plan should include how VREs interoperate with the increasing catalog of products and services provided by RDA groups especially related to e-RIs.