Please save the date for the International FAIR Convergence Symposium convened by CODATA and GO FAIR on October 22-23 2020; followed by the CODATA General Assembly, 24 October 2020.

Where: Paris, France
Venue: TBC

The International FAIR Convergence Symposium will provide a forum for advancing international and cross-domain convergence around FAIR. The event will bring together a global data community with an interest in combining data across domains for a host of research issues – including major global challenges, such as those relating to the Sustainable Development Goals. Outcomes will directly link to the CODATA Decadal Programme ‘Data for the Planet: making data work for cross-domain grand challenges’ and to the developments of GO FAIR community towards the Internet of FAIR data and services.

Participation is open to ALL researchers and data experts, particularly those with an interest in participating in the CODATA Decadal Programme and in the GO FAIR Community. There will be a mechanism for participants to organise workshop sessions: for example, GO FAIR INs, CODATA TGs and other groups are encouraged to participate and to organise sessions.

The two-day Symposium will be followed on 24 October by the CODATA General Assembly which will see the election of new Officers, Executive Committee and Task Groups.

More information about the event and means of participation will follow in due course.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Paris.

A special issue on The FAIR Principles: First Generation Implementation Choices and Challenges, has been recently published in Data Intelligence. This special issue, organized by Prof. Dr. Barend Mons, the senior author of the foundational paper on FAIR Principles and the President of CODATA, Dr. Erik Schultes and Dr. Annika Jacobsen, contains 28 articles authored by 135 experts from 14 countries/territories worldwide.

In this special issue, the original conception of the FAIR principles and what they are intended to cover is explained in detail (see https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/dint_r_00024), and the prototype of FAIR Implementation Profile and the FAIR convergence Matrix which aims to coordinate a broadly accepted, widely used FAIR implementation approaches is presented (see https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/dint_a_00038). The first 16 articles are bundled as a relevant set of “first generation” implementations and emerging practices in the context of FAIR and the last 12 articles focus more on gaps in existing technology and practices encountered or envisioned and offer opinions and propose directional solutions for the relevant communities to develop FAIR guided approaches. Although this special issue only has covered a limited number of all early endeavors, “it will likely inspire other efforts to bundle and expose useful and hopefully reusable solutions”, as stated by Prof. Dr. Rianne Letschert in her brief introductory comment to this special issue. 

The TOC of the issue is listed below. To go to a full-text page, please just click on the title.

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Editorial: The FAIR Principles: First Generation Implementation Choices and Challenges

Barend Mons, Erik Schultes, Fenghong Liu & Annika Jacobsen

1 FAIR Principles: Interpretations and Implementation Considerations

1. Jacobsen, R. de Miranda Azevedo, N. Juty, D. Batista, S. Coles, R. Cornet, … & E. Schultes.

2 Unique, Persistent, Resolvable: Identifiers as the Foundation of FAIR

Nick Juty, Sarala M. Wimalaratne, Stian Soiland-Reyes, John Kunze, Carole A. Goble & Tim Clark

3 Making Data and Workflows Findable for Machines

Tobias Weigel, Ulrich Schwardmann, Jens Klump, Sofiane Bendoukha & Robert Quick

4 The “A” of FAIR – As Open as Possible, as Closed as Necessary

Annalisa Landi, Mark Thompson, Viviana Giannuzzi, Fedele Bonifazi, Ignasi Labastida, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos & Marco Roos

5 A Generic Workflow for the Data FAIRification Process

Annika Jacobsen, Rajaram Kaliyaperumal, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos, Barend Mons, Erik Schultes, Marco Roos & Mark Thompson

6 Ontology-based Access Control for FAIR Data

Christopher Brewster, Barry Nouwt, Stephan Raaijmakers & Jack Verhoosel

7 FAIR Data Reuse – the Path through Data Citation

Paul Groth, Helena Cousijn, Tim Clark & Carole Goble

8 Making FAIR Easy with FAIR Tools: From Creolization to Convergence

Mark Thompson, Kees Burger, Rajaram Kaliyaperumal, Marco Roos & Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos

9 Distributed Analytics on Sensitive Medical Data: The Personal Health Train

Oya Beyan, Ananya Choudhury, Johan van Soest, Oliver Kohlbacher5, Lukas Zimmermann, Holger Stenzhorn, Md. Rezaul Karim, Michel Dumontier, Stefan Decker, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos & Andre Dekker 

10 FAIR Computational Workflows

Carole Goble, Sarah Cohen-Boulakia, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Daniel Garijo,Yolanda Gil, Michael R. Crusoe, Kristian Peters & Daniel Schober

11 FAIR Data and Services in Biodiversity Science and Geoscience

Larry Lannom, Dimitris Koureas & Alex R. Hardisty

12 Taking FAIR on the ChIN: The Chemistry Implementation Network

Simon J. Coles, Jeremy G. Frey, Egon L. Willighagen & Stuart J. Chalk

13 Growing the FAIR Community at the Intersection of the Geosciences and Pure and Applied Chemistry

Shelley Stall, Leah McEwen, Lesley Wyborn, Nancy Hoebelheinrich & Ian Bruno

14 Helping the Consumers and Producers of Standards, Repositories and Policies to Enable FAIR Data

Peter McQuilton, Dominique Batista, Oya Beyan, Ramon Granell, Simon Coles, Massimiliano Izzo … & Susanna-Assunta Sansone

15 FAIR Convergence Matrix: Optimizing the Reuse of Existing FAIR-Related Resources

Hana Perg Sustkova, Kristina Maria Hettne, Peter Wittenburg, Annika Jacobsen, Tobias Kuhn … & Erik Schultes

16 The FAIR Funding Model: Providing a Framework for Research Funders to Drive the Transition toward FAIR Data Management and Stewardship Practices

Margreet Bloemers & Annalisa Montesanti

17 Ontology, Ontologies and the “I” of FAIR

Giancarlo Guizzardi

18 How to (Easily) Extend the FAIRness of Existing Repositories

Mark Hahnel & Dan Valen

19 Licensing FAIR Data for Reuse

Ignasi Labastida1 & Thomas Margoni

20 Data Management Planning: How Requirements and Solutions are Beginning to Converge

Sarah Jones, Robert Pergl, Rob Hooft, Tomasz Miksa, Robert Samors, Judit Ungvari … & Tina Lee 

21 Social Data: CESSDA Best Practices

Ron Dekker

22 State of FAIRness in ESFRI Projects

Peter Wittenburg, Franciska de Jong, Dieter van Uytvanck, Massimo Cocco, Keith Jeffery, Michael Lautenschlager … & Petr Holub

23 GO FAIR Brazil: A Challenge for Brazilian Data Science

Luana Sales, Patrícia Henning, Viviane Veiga, Maira Murrieta Costa, Luís Fernando Sayão, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva Santos & Luís Ferreira Pires

24 FAIR Practices in Africa

Mirjam van Reisen, Mia Stokmans, Munyaradzi Mawere, Mariam Basajja, Antony Otieno Ong’ayo, Primrose Nakazibwe, Christine Kirkpatrick & Kudakwashe Chindoza

25 FAIR Practices in Europe

Peter Wittenburg, Michael Lautenschlager, Hannes Thiemann, Carsten Baldauf & Paul Trilsbeek

26 Towards the Tipping Point for FAIR Implementation

Mirjam Van Reisen, Mia Stokmans, Mariam Basajja, Antony Otieno Ong’ayo, Christine Kirkpatrick & Barend Mons

27 The Need of Industry to Go FAIR

Herman van Vlijmen, Albert Mons, Arne Waalkens, Wouter Franke, Arie Baak, Gerbrand Ruiter … & Jean-Marc Neefs.

28 Considerations for the Conduction and Interpretation of FAIRness Evaluations

Ricardo de Miranda Azevedo, Mark Wilkinson & Michel Dumontier

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About Data Intelligence

Data Intelligence (DI) journal, a new publication jointly launched by the MIT Press and Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is chaired by Prof. Barend Mons. Co-Editors in Chief of the journal are Prof. Jim Hendler at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA , Prof Huizhou Liu, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Ying Ding at University of Texas at Austin.

Registration is now open for the RDAP (Research Data Access and Preservation Association) 2020 Summit in Santa Fe, NM! The Summit, which will take place at the Santa Fe Convention Center, will run March 11 and 12, with an additional day of workshops on March 13. Registration for the Summit is $209; workshops are an additional $50 each, although one is being provided free of charge thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. You can also now view our program schedule, including on Sched.

We are happy to announce the Call for Proposals for the 8th Annual North American Data Documentation Initiative Conference (NADDI).  The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing the data produced by surveys and other observational methods in the social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences.

NADDI 2020 Theme

The conference theme is “Making Data FAIR by using Metadata Standards.”

The main conference sponsor is IPUMS at the University of Minnesota Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation.

Aimed at individuals working in and around research data and metadata, NADDI 2020 seeks submissions of presentations and posters that highlight the use of DDI and other metadata standards within research projects, official statistics, survey operations, academic libraries, and data archives.

Proposals can include:

• Presentations
• Panels
• Posters
• Workshops or Tutorials

Important Information

• March 6: Deadline for conference proposals
• March 31: Notification of acceptance
• May 31: Early rate registration deadline
• Conference Dates: June 17-19, 2020
• Conference Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

How to Submit

Submissions may be made through the conference web site.  The proposal deadline is March 6, 2020.

SPEAKERS:

• Erin Robinson – Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)
• Dr Steven McEachern – Australian Data Archive, ANU
• Alena Rybkina – Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA)
• John Broome – Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA)
• Francoise Perlman – FourBridges
• Dr Ben Evans – National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)
• Magdalena Brus – Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) European Research
• Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), ENVRI

SUMMARY:

• Building on the FAIR principles, this session explored a series of pilots and initiatives currently underway to develop data infrastructures and to increase collaboration and access to the increasing surge of data currently being captured globally. There has been some headway in the global north, but less in the global south.
• Collaboration was identified as a major obstacle to increase cross-institutional, multi-disciplinary and international access to de-fragment the data landscape.
• By improving the access and collaboration across disciplines, it will be possible to better address socioeconomic problems such as responses to infectious diseases, disaster risk reduction and building resilient cities.
• Using the FAIR principles to unify data across a range of sources and data types requires the development of pilots to test how this unification and inter-operability of data would be undertaken.
• It is important to recognize how different disciplines can offer insights to different data problems or questions, but still work together to address larger societal problems.
• As the amount, quality and type of data available grows rapidly, it is equally important to ensure that the data infrastructure grows with it in order to process it. At the moment, the infrastructure is somewhat lagging behind.
• By developing and investing in the data infrastructure, it is possible to make the data easier to access and use, and make the data smarter and better targeted to the problems it is used to address. However, there are challenges for business models, societal models and policy/governance issues. Of serious concern is that the people working on the policy around data and data infrastructure cannot keep up or understand the challenges.
• While there are many groups working towards de-siloing data and data infrastructure, there needs to be an umbrella approach to avoid duplication of efforts and unify the approach. CODATA is leading the design and execution of a Decadal Programme that will address the data interoperability challenge  identified in the International Science Council’s  2019-2021 Action Plan. The Decadal Program is currently being developed to address this issue and is seeking expressions of interest to help in its development.
• The session brought together individuals from around the world and many different organisations who are interested in addressing this concept of a multi-disciplinary, democratization of data.
• During discussion there was some concern regarding ethical issues around data accessibility and sharing that still needs to be addressed.

QUOTES:  John Broome (CODATA): ‘Partnerships will be critical. Clearly no one organisation can hope to achieve the overall goal.’

ABSTRACT:
Accessing and integrating data from heterogeneous sources is a significant barrier facing evidence-based responses to global grand challenges. To address this ISC-CODATA is preparing an international, coordinating research program; ESIP has developed a community of practice around earth science data standards; and ENVRI aims to align and share FAIR compliant in-situ data and services. This workshop will 1) invite the GEO community to engage with these initiatives; 2) examine specific challenges relating to data accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR); and 3) examine these issues around a set of pilot case studies, including infectious diseases, resilient cities and disaster risk reduction.

Grand challenges need to access and integrate data from many different sources. Discovery and interoperability mechanisms are frequently suboptimal.  Time and space is usually a key to integration, and remote sensing and in-situ Earth observation data play a crucial role.  The session will allow detailed exploration of the issues in relation to case studies of significance to the GEO community.  The workshop will explore the applicability and potential of the FAIR principles, ‘fitness for use’ criteria, Operational Readiness Levels, alignment of metadata specifications, and data cubes to contribute towards the solutions needed to assist data integration.

PRESENTATION:

Please find the presentation here.

Organizers

• International Science Council – ISC
• CODATA – Committee on Data of the ISC
• ESIP – Earth Science Information Partners (US)
• ARDC – Australian Research Data Commons
• The National Committee for Data in Science (NCDiS) of the AAS – Australian Academy of science
• AuScope
• NCI – National Computational Infrastructure (Australia)
• CSIRO (Australia)
• The European Environmental Research Infrastructure Community (ENVRI

Contact

John Broome (CODATA), Erin Robinson (ESIP) (johnhbroome@gmail.com, erinrobinson@esipfed.org)

Name: Henry Mibei
Designation: Operations Manager Mobile, Africa
Organization: CAB International

CODATA 2019 conference: Towards next-generation data-driven science: policies, practices and platforms

Background:

CODATA exists to promote global collaboration to improve the availability and usability of data for all areas of research. CODATA supports the principle that data produced by research and likely to be used for research should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. CODATA works also to advance the interoperability and the usability of such data: “Research data should be intelligently open or FAIR”. By promoting the policy, technological and cultural changes that are essential to make research data more widely available and more usable, CODATA helps advance ICSU’s mission of strengthening international science for the benefit of society. The conference, themed, ‘Towards next-generation data-driven science: policies, practices and platforms’  was organized by CODATA and CODATA-China with support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of P. R. China, China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), and National Natural Science Foundation of China. The conference attracted more than 300 participants from six continents and representing 45 countries.

Objective of the Conference

This conference provided a significant opportunity to survey and examine developments in open data policies from a global perspective.

My Objectives

• To present a The paper was accepted for publication in the Data science journal. http://datascience.codata.org/.
• To build networks with academics and experts and to share thoughts on advances and technological breakthroughs for future business
• To increase visibility of CABI the organization I work for, and CODATA who sponsored my attendance in the conference

Science globally is being transformed by new digital technologies. At the same time addressing the major global challenges of the age requires the analysis of vast quantities of heterogeneous  data  from multiple  sources.   In  response,  many  countries,  regions  and scientific domains have developed Research Infrastructures to assist with the management, stewardship and analysis. These developments have been stimulated by Open Science policies and practices, both those developed by funders and those that have emerged from communities. The FAIR principles and supporting practices seek to accelerate this process and unlock the potential of analysis at scale with machines.

Benefit to attending the Conference

Attending the conference gave me an opportunity to showcase my research findings in open science space. Networking and exposure also gave me an opportunity for future collaboration. It was an opportunity to increase the visibility of CABI and CODATA.

• Interacting with researchers and experts in this International forum was a good way of increasing CABI’s visibility in the data science space, a current and trending area for business
• CABI as the current host of the GODAN secretariat, which advocates for open data and open access policy as well as release and reusability of data for improved environmental and social outcomes needs to be more represented in similar forums to showcase our strengths in data science as we week new partnerships in the My attendance to the conference was a benefit to CABI.
• CABI’s research is diverse and large quantities of data are gathered and generated therefore maintaining a good relationship and publishing in the CODATA science journal and other affiliated journals gives CABI more options to publish data science related work in a wide array of journals improving knowledge access and

Title of Presentation(s):

Session Title: Building resilience on food security and nutrition through Open Data https://conference.codata.org/CODATA_2019/sessions/143

 Programme

Onsite Presentations

This session was primarily chaired by Henry Mibei where eight papers were presented, four papers onsite and four presented remotely. Henry noted that resilience building will require the use of timely and accurate data/information that leverages on technologies that build on agro-ecological knowledge and the entire agricultural value chain layers comprising farmers, environment information and agricultural practices. Henry presented a paper on designing user-centered decision support tools for agriculture outlining the lessons from the development and deployment of a fertilizer optimization tool. HM outlined that any digital product should be developed considering user’s requirements, objectives and feedback. “If we don’t solve real problems for our users, they’re not going to give us business. Design has to do with intention and that intention is always to solve a human problem. Successful systems and products begin with an understanding of the needs and requirements of the users”.

Highlights:

• Information ranging from climate and rainfall patterns, droughts, trends in crop pests and diseases to the number of farmers in a particular area should be put in the public domain so that it can be easily accessed to facilitate decision-making
• There is often too much information available to make a clear decision, with so much data to sort through, you need something more from the There is a need then to think about the capacity to analyse data and to apply that information to decision-making.
• Open data is crucial in modernizing food production systems and governments in particular should strive to make it accessible especially to the smallholder
• Question on sustainability of donor projects emerged e. being able to perform and deliver project benefits to the primary target group after the funding from a donor terminates. What should be done? Sustainability requires long term planning to facilitate diverse donor engagement and to improve institutional capacity of the target population. It is important to integrate sustainability aspects in the project right from the beginning. This will help to develop partnerships and relations with relevant stakeholders at an early stage of project development and ensure that once the primary funding terminates there is a strong support to continue delivering project’s objectives. It is also important to involve key stakeholders in program development. As part of the project activities initiate multi-stakeholder dialogue workshops should be conducted to involve relevant people in the project.
  

Benefits/Value add to CODATA

• The visibility of CODATA was quite excellent
• This was an opportunity for CODATA to increase its visibility to more than 300 delegates and the rest of the world that never came through the
• CODATA was acknowledged in my presentation slides and the presentation was also linked to a story published in CABI’s website accessed in the link https://www.cabi.org/news-article/fertilizer-optimization-tool-to-increase-farmers-  yields-highlighted-at-codata-2019-conference/
• CABI has a global presence, with 500 CABI staff in different continents.
• Refer to Henry Mibei’s presentation, co-written with Rware, ‘Desig ning User –Centered Decision Support T ools f or Agriculture’ which is downloadable from the SCRIBD platform.
• CODATA acknowledged in the publications that will be sent to the patterns and the CODATA Science
• Publicity through social media is as below;
  

Delegates at CODATA 2019 Conference, Friendship Hotel Beijing China, 19th September 2019

Contacts/Collaborations

Conveners: CODATA, CODATA China
Supporter: Minister of Science and Technology (MOST), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), NSFC
Local organizer: Computer Network Information Center, CAS; National S&T Infrastructure Center, MOST