An Early Career Grantee take on the 14th RDA Plenary
The 14th RDA Plenary in Helsinki was my second time attending an RDA Plenary, the first having been the 11th RDA Plenary in Berlin. My expectations were therefore high, and were thoroughly met.
This time, I was advised by my colleagues at RDA-PT to apply for an early career grant. I was honoured when I was informed that I had been one of the nine awardees. I was also aware of the responsibility it entailed. I had been selected to get an inside view on RDA, and to help bring new researchers into the fold. To that effect, I was pleased to have the opportunity to collaborate with three groups. They were:
I acted as note-taker in all of the group meetings, and found all of them to be extremely interesting.
During the ELIXIR Bridging Force IG meeting, I was able to follow up on the effords by the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) on establishing a federated network to share biomolecular human data within the ELIXIR framework.
In the Active Data Management Plans IG meeting, I was given an overview on the ongoing effords by the community within the real of bringing machine-actionable features to Data Management Plans (DMP).
However the meeting that impressed me the most, was the DMP Common Standards WG meeting titled “Machine-actionable DMPs - take them and use them!”. Where the WG presented their metadata application profile, that offers a minimum set of terms to describe a DMP.
I had already attended a past WG meeting, during the 11th RDA Plenary, and subsequently began to collaborate with the chairs. This year, as an early career grantee, the chairs saw fit that I should present some of the work I’ve been doing that falls within the spectrum of the WG. I was overjoyed to be asked to present the DMP Common Standards Ontology, which in essence is a representation of the metadata application profile that is to be recommended by the WG.
My final contribution to the 14th RDA plenary was the presentation of a poster titled “DMP training: A new Methodology”. It described the effort by BioData.pt to clarify the Portuguese Bioinformatics community on the topic of Data Management Plan (DMP) . Namely through the creation of an event that uses a specifically created methodology to introduce researchers to this topic.
Overall I am delighted with my participation in the 14th RDA Plenary. I hope to attend future plenaries, but in the meantime I will carry on collaborating with both my colleagues at RDA-PT as well as the chairs of the DMP Common Standard WG.