Good news

Dear all,
This email was sent last Friday, but due to technical issues, it did not reached your email boxes. However, the feeling is still the same!
Greetings from MTSR in Goettingen! Yesterday we had the good news that our group has been accepted by the RDA board. Congratulations to all!
The news arrived on the same day of our panel on Agrisemantics... which we had during the conference plenary, special track on Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food & Environment (AgroSEM'16). See conference page: http://www.mtsr-conf.org/index.php/tracks/agriculture-food-and-environment
The panel aimed to address the following: "Semantics to enable sharing and interoperability of data in agriculture. What do we need?"
After a short 5-minute talk, our seven panelists and the people in the plenary discussed various aspects of semantic for interoperability. Here a few of the questions:
* All your presentations seem to have textual and numeric data in mind. What about other types of documents, such as images, sounds etc
* What would we need as community building means to develop use of semantics: events (hackathons, workshops...), tools, etc?
* You emphasize the importance of collaborations. But what are the mechanisms in place for data users to provide feedback to data producers?
* We usually do semantics afterwards. Is there a chance that data producing systems, e.g. agricultural instruments, become "Rdf native speakers"?
* This is a very open and constructive discussion. I wander why it does not happen in my working environment, industry. Can you tell me why this is not the case and what we can do to make these discussions happen?
We are looking forward to start the working group activities with you all.
Kind regards,
Sophie, Caterina and Panos