CODATA and partners are convening a virtual session at the UN World Data Forum, 13:00-14:00 UTC on Monday 4 October.
Registration for the UN World Data Forum (free): https://whova.com/
UN WDF Programme: https://unstats.un.
Overview
Solving today’s global grand challenges demands that science and policy embrace data innovations, synergies, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Therefore, the International Science Council, acting as the global voice for science, is launching the CODATA Decadal Programme ‘Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges’, and seeks the collaboration of UN partners and other stakeholders in this initiative.
The Programme will build the international communities of practice needed to enhance and harmonise digital and data capacity across science and policy, and mutually reinforce one another’s ability to respond to emerging opportunities and threats. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated both the power of data-driven science-policy dialogues and exchanges, and also the need for improvement to face future challenges as a global community. Creating a two-way, digital bridge between scientific research and official monitoring is vital to enable scientifically grounded policy, and translation of society’s needs to science. New techniques for data mobility—getting the data when and where needed—and analysis that leverage huge amounts of data and information, from both traditional and new sources, are revolutionising this space.
This session builds on one with the same title in the 2020 virtual forum. As well as showcasing and discussing progress with the objectives described, it also features new speakers from related initiatives. New developments include 1) the UN Data Standards for United Nations system-wide reporting of financial data (the “Data Cube”) https://unsceb.org/sites/
Topics
The session will cover the following related topics:
- the new UN Data Standards for United Nations system-wide reporting of financial data (the “Data Cube”), an HLCM-UNSDG product that received much praise and is one of the two flagship initiatives of the recently published UN Secretary-General’s Data Strategy;
- new work in the context of the Oceans Decade on SDGs to develop and harmonise ontologies to bridge between a number of UN Agencies;
- progress on the finalisation and publication of the UNDRR-ISC Hazard Information Profiles, and in particular on the governance, maintenance and technical presentation of this essential resource for the Sendai process;
- the innovative new work of the ALPHA network, as part of an IRDC project, to combine demographic, health and clinical data for COVID-19, and to provide an ML-enhanced dashboard and visualisations for policy makers.
- progress on good practice in semantic products (vocabularies, ontologies, metadata profiles)
- the further development of the DDI-CDI specification to assist with linking and bridging between data sets.
Panel
- Introduction: Data Bridges – Why a Decadal Programme? (5 minutes)
Simon Hodson (Moderator) CODATA - Data Cube: HLCM-UNSDG Data Standards for United Nations system-wide reporting of financial data (8 minutes)
Henriette Keijzers, Strategic Adviser, Secretariat, United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination - Harmonisation of ontologies for the Oceans Decade (8 minutes)
Pier Luigi Buttigieg, GEOMAR Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel: Kiel, DE - Hazard Information Profiles: scientific input, governance, maintenance and technical presentation (8 minutes)
Virginia Murray, CODATA Executive Committee, Chair of the ISC-UNDRR Hazard Definitions and Classification Review Technical Working Group and Head of Global Disaster Risk Reduction, Public Health England / Simon Cox, CSIRO, Australia and CODATA Executive Committee - Harmonisation, Visualisation and Analysis of COVID-19 Data in Malawi and Kenya (8 minutes)
Chifundo Kanjala, Metadata professional, Network for Analysing Longitudinal Population-based HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 data on Africa, Lilongwe, Malawi - Good Practice and Guidelines for Semantic Interoperability (8 minutes)
Alejandra Gonzalez Beltran, Data and Software Engineering Group Leader, Science and Technologies Facilities Council, UK Research and Innovation - Discussion, feedback and invitation to get involved (15 minutes)
Arofan Gregory (Moderator) Consultant, CODATA and DDI Alliance