The 3rd Plenary Meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) took place between 26-28/3/2014 in Dublin Ireland. It was my 2nd participation in a row to an RDA plenary meeting and I managed to organize my trip (even at the last moment) and be there.

Just before the launch of the 3rd RDA Plenary Meeting[/caption] Statistics about the 3rd RDA plenary 477 participants registered and attended the meeting. The overall RDA membership is 1,585 from 71 countries (64% from academia; 49% EU, 37%US; 2% policy makers).   About the venue The meeting was hosted at the Croke Park, which is a nice combination of a football stadium and an exhibition center - a fully equipped one I have to admit; the plenary sessions took place at a large hall which fitted the almost 500 RDA meeting participants nicely while coffee and lunch breaks took place right outside the hall. I wouldn't want to know more about the logistics (taking care of such a big number of participants for catering etc. must be a hard task) but the organizers did a great work. There were some issues with the wifi connection but the technicians were working on them as well as lack of power outlets in the big hall (which left a high percentage of the laptops used by the participants for tweeting etc. off after the first couple of hours) but in the end everything was fine. Kudos to the organizers of the event, as the logistics for such a large and diverse audience were arranged almost perfectly!

Day 1 Plenary Session The plenary session started with keynote speeches and greetings; I personally enjoyed more the Keynote Address by Prof. Ian Chubb AC, Australia's Chief Scientist. Some of his key-points, as extracted by various tweets were the following:

• We need national, international and inter-disciplinary collaboration in research and innovation;
• We need research and data to be able to feed 9 billion people, producing carbohydrates and fiber while climate moves;

You can also watch his presentation recording here. Additional presentations/speeches took place afterwards, mostly highlighting the fact that data exist and it is up to the users to find a meaningful way to use them and that infrastructure is already here, waiting for useful applications. The highlight was a cartoon presented by Dr. Ross Wilkinson, Executive Director, Australian National Data Service, showing a donkey, a cart and a carrot; an image really familiar to many of us. This led to nice and funny discussions as well as an explosion of related tweets! In general, the topics were focused on the importance of open data, the role of the e-infrastructures and policies  as well as ways to open up existing data.  

Day 1 WG/IG sessions

I opted to attend the "BoF Education and skills development on Data Intensive Science" organized by Yuri Demchenko and Wouter Los , which aimed to identify opportunities for the new field of data scientists. Miguel-Angel Sicilia from the University of Alcala was also there, proposing his approach on the subject and discussing the possibility of an interest group, a proposal of which has already been submitted. Discussions were interesting and focused on the existing curricula all over the world. Next was the meeting of the Agricultural Data Interoperability IG, which was chaired by agINFRA colleagues Johannes Keizer (FAO) and Devika Madalli (Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore). There I made a presentation titled "Global RDF Descriptors for Germplasm Data", describing the work done in the context of the agINFRA project and the RDA WG towards the exposure and publication of germplasm data as linked data (always based on the work already done by other experts in this field).