Proposal for Joint Env. Groups meeting at the 5th RDA plenary

Dear Dimitris, friends,
Recently I have been in contact with Bo Weidema, from Bonsai (they deal
with carbon footprint information).
They might share similar issues as you, but I am not an expert in your
field.
In any case, I put him here in CC, maybe they are interested in
participating.
On a related note, this february I am organizing a training on RDA
outputs so far, and I am also organizing the "adoption day" event.
In any case, should the chairs of the outputs not be available at the
specific time, I might be able to help with technical information
(assuming I am available timewise).
Cheers,
Herman

Dimitris
Yes. Good take.
It is worth asking what 'adopt' means. In my view, it should mean,
sustaining a deliverable. That takes us away from the standard research
funding paradigm, and into either commercial services, or a new and special
role for institutions such as NHM or libraries. to maintain the deliverable.
From there, we can start thinking about what deliverables might be in the
big data world. Can we think in modules, and about which modules we wish
to invest in.
- what will the future shape of infrastructure look like. I attach my
diagrams of a rather anarchic systems of nodes each of which - like GenBank
- takes responsibility in a domain. I believe this is crediible. Next step,
I think it to turn it from an abstract idea to a map with named components,
and how they need to interact.
What will then give us a good return for investment. For example, we
might ask what elements of infrastructure will many of the IGs benefit
from. The capacity to correct and update the scientific names in
distributed sources so that we have a good common index to all content
(names resolution services) comes to mind - oddly. The LinkD proposal has
helped us to understand what kinds of players we need to have in that team,
but also that we need to design the system from the deliverable backwards,
rather than from the players forwards.
Another path may be to all commit to the same project. As a member of the
executive of IUBS, I have been pushing for an informatics agenda through
IUBS (becausee IUBS has a mantra 'unified biology'. We have suggested we
work with 'FutureEarth', and articulate what kind of infrastructure they
are going to need. the RDA IGs could greatly help in thta area also.
If you would like either idea developed into the form of a 2 pager, I can
do that.
Paddy

Dear BI IG members,

Many thanks for all your feedback regarding the motion for a joint meeting between all the RDA groups in the wider environmental cluster. There seem to be three major points thst we could use as a provisional agenda items:

1. Cross-fertilisation and coordination of activities between our groups

2. Name services and their impact in bringing together heterogeneous data

3. Common biodiversity/environemntal metadata standards

4. e-infrastructures interoperability and environmental service provision integration

I will contact the chairs of the respective Groups to propose this joint activity. If mor ethan 5 groups we will request a plenary session of the environmental cluster

If you are a memebr in any one of the the environemntal cluster groups, would you please liase to the chairs of these groups and investigate whether they would have an equal interest in this motion?

We need to submit this by Monday 15 Dec!

Many thanks,

Dimitris