RDA 5th Plenary Meeting

The 5th Plenary Meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is taking place at San Diego, CA, USA between 9-11 of March 2015. Following the tradition, Agro-Know is represented for once more at this great event by our colleague Giorgos Papoutsis, our  Data Ingestion Associate who is participating as a representative of the Big Data Europe Η2020 Project and he will focus his contributions to the Agricultural Data Interoperability Interest Group meeting, where he will present the case of the agINFRA project as a mean for connecting agricultural data through an open and participatory data infrastructure. It should be noted that Giorgos is also actively involved in the data ingestion processes of AGRIS.

Giorgos Papoutsis with Prof. Toshihiro Ashino (left) and our agINFRA partner Dr. Xuefu Zhang (right)

I have personally participated in the 2nd (Washington D.C.) and 3rd (Dublin, Ireland) RDA Plenary Meetings but for various reasons I was not able to attend this specific one. It came during a period were we were all busy with the development of our new solution for the Horizon 2020 Open Access Policy (aiming at both proposals and projects) so I missed the opportunity to get in touch with my colleagues attending the 5th meeting. From my previous experience, I can only say that the RDA Plenary meetings are a great opportunity to collaborate with great people all over the world, work on common issues, get updated on topics of interest and of course network!

Despite that fact, I am still closely following (and supporting remotely) the work of both the Agricultural Data Interoperability Interest Group (mostly through the agINFRA project contributions) but also the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group, where a great handbook for people working with wheat research data is under preparation :-)