Disciplinary Collaboration Framework IG

The group held a BoF session at Plenary 9, Barcelona, April 2017.

From the session description:

Over the couple of years we witnessed an increase in the number of Interest and Working Groups operating within RDA. The enlargement of the RDA ecosystem creates new opportunities for interaction between practitioners from across scientific and technological domains. Examples of this interplay were previously seen at RDA plenaries, through joint sessions between discipline-specific and technologically-oriented groups.

The primary foci of these interactions were (i) to investigate the applicability and identify routes to implementation of RDA outputs and (ii) to discuss disciplinary specificities and use them as use cases for development or refinement of RDA outputs.

Issues relating to accessibility of data, data annotation, collaboration or even publishing norms are often perceived in completely different ways within different disciplines. This has led to a challenging landscape, that lacks a consistent requirements framework that can drive development of technological solutions as well as their implementation. Although, respecting the disciplinary specificities and modi operandi is crucial, it is also important to identify and describe commonalities and address them in a consistent and robust manner.
We propose the formulation of an RDA Interest Group that will aim at bringing together representatives across disciplinary communities in an effort to better organise and drive the discussion for prioritising, harmonising and efficiently articulating communities’ needs. The group will gradually support the development of a common disciplinary interoperability framework. 

The high-level objectives of the group would be to:

• Contribute to the development of information material for communities of practice;
• Assess and prioritise disciplinary needs for research data curation and sharing; 
• Introduce RDA technical outputs to discipline representatives and collate feedback;
• Liaise between disciplinary groups, improving collaboration and experience exchange;
• Perform a disciplinary RDA landscape and gap analyses;
• Organise the collation of material and interact with RDA disciplinary ambassadors