Towards global data e-infrastructures – Research Data Alliance

Specific challenge: European contribution to the development of global data infrastructures needs to ensure Europe's role as a global player. This can be achieved by strengthening and consolidating Europe's contribution to the Research Data Alliance (RDA), ensuring that RDA fosters research data interoperability and exchange at global level. RDA is an open international forum to create consensus on solutions and best practices to specific problems hampering data exchange and interoperability.

Scope: Proposals will support all of the following points:

(1) definition, operation and monitoring of the governance structures of the Research Data Alliance (RDA); secondment and exchange of staff where appropriate;

(2) active participation of European stakeholders (organisations and individual experts) in RDA and leadership initiatives in strategic working group activities; EU industry involvement and innovation will be promoted in particular;

(3) engaging scientific communities having underdeveloped data infrastructures in defining the best practices for data exchange and interoperability; and

(4) establishing coordination mechanisms at European level (national research funders, European education and research associations) and with international organisations dealing with standardisation, research data and education issues (IETF, W3C, CODATA, OECD, UNESCO, …).

Expected impact:  Europe will be in a leading position in enabling the use of the world's store of research data in multi-disciplinary, data intensive global scientific collaborations. It will help the development and adoption of relevant international open standards based on the best practices of a large spectrum of research communities. It will engage research communities at early stages of standards development and address common data requirements for new services bringing together users and technology providers. It will promote sustainable models for research data sharing and install trust in the adopted solutions.

Type of action: Coordination and support actions