Sharing RDA Outputs in more ways than one

In late 2014, the Reserach Data Alliance - RDA - published its first tangible outputs all aiming to achieve seamless interoperability, trust and ultimately to provide growth & employment opportunities:

1. Data Foundation & Terminology with a simple unifying data model facilitating interoperability
2. Data Type Registry with a registry of data types to facilitate their usage
3. PID Information Types with a generic interface for PID service providers and users and a harmonized category set
4. Practical Policies with best practices for a wide number of automatized data management and processing policies

EUDAT is one of the European adopters of these outputs together with Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) and the German Climate Computing Center (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum – DKRZ), incidentally both partners in the EUDAT initiative.

EUDAT has always been strongly involved in RDA and practical examples of this were seen at the RDA Adoption Day organized in San Diego on 8th March 2015 during the Fifth RDA Plenary meeting. Mark van de Sanden, SURFsara & EUDAT Service Manager, presented practical implementation of RDA outputs from the Practical Policy working group in EUDAT’s common data infrastructure.

In reference to the Data Type Registries group its objective was to make it easier to create machine-readable and researcher-accessible registries of data types that support the accurate use of data, as unclear typing of data can make data open to misinterpretation and limit its usefulness. For more than a year, this working group collaborated together to develop its model and an implementation. The infrastructure products of this group are being adopted by EUDAT, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S., and additional groups who are applying it to their own research activities.

But the collaboration does not stop there, EUDAT’s user-friendly, secure, robust, reliable and trusted service (B2SHARE) to share and store research data adding value to research data by assigning Persistent Identifiers to ensure long-lasting access and reference is the official RDA Outputs repository. As soon as the first set of RDA Outputs have completed the community review process they will be deposited on B2SHARE.