Thursday, September 19, 2013

RDA 2nd Plenary Meeting: Day 2

The second day of the RDA Plenary took place at the Washington Marriott hotel. It consisted of break out sessions dedicated to each Interest Group of RDA. I participated in the session of the Agricultural Data Interoperability WG. Each session was located at a different meeting room, which allowed the participants to focus on the topic and contribute to the progress of the Group - however, at the same time one could not attend two sessions of interest, if they were scheduled in the same time slot.

The Agricultural session consisted of about 25 people, including Johannes Keizer (Chair), Devika Madalli (co-Chair), Esther Dzale Yeumo Kabore (INRA) and me. There were people from various organizations, but the ones that come to my mind right now are Luz Marina Alvare from IFPRI and Martin Carr from CABI. Unfortunately I could not see all participants of the meeting, as I was standing at the end of the (long) table. The discussion was based on the proposed agenda and brought up some really interesting issues, including the suggestion for creation of a new Germplasm working group among others.  The outcomes of the meeting are available here; however, there are no photos from the meeting, as I was focused on both participating and keeping notes...

After the lunch break, it was time for a new round of break out sessions; this time (and since our session was over) I decided to attend the session dedicated to metadata. There were some interesting discussions there as well, including some really interesting for the Agri IG. The main idea was about a registry of metadata standards and schemas based on the Digital Curation Center (DDC), as well as the option to have a machine-readable export of the existing information. Unfortunately, the internet connection was not consistent, leading to constant disconnections and issues with the presentations which included links and live demos - let alone twitting!

The last session I attended was dedicated to Data Citation; unfortunately that was a continuation of a previous session (which I did not manage to attend) so it was rather hard to follow but still I found some interesting stuff there. In addition, I got to meet Fotis Karagiannis and Yiannis Ioannidis (University of Athens & ATHENA Research Center), who work with Natalia Manola in the OpenAIRE project and the Athena Research and Innovation Center.


The day ended with a Conference Dinner on the Odyssey Dinner Cruise; however, I was so tired (not fully recovered from the jet lag) that I decided to go for a walk around Washington and then get some rest. I managed to walk until the Capitol passing through the White House and took some really nice photos, which are available here.

In addition, there are photos from the RDA Plenary meeting at the RDA website.

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