(Photo from IGAD Pre-Meeting in Tokyo, Japan, during the RDA P7)

The preparations for the IGAD pre-meeting , held on 3-4 April, 2017, in Barcelona – before 9th RDA Plenary Meeting - are in high gear. During the IGAD special event, several IGAD Discussion and Working Groups will present their results on past and ongoing activities, lessons learned and future strategic and action plans with focus on research data management and semantics. 

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CONTEXT

In order to optimize and maximize performance of agricultural research globally, there is a need to have access to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) agricultural data, and to develop and enhance on its basis trusted, smart infrastructure services (connected through common semantics) able to support responsible data in agriculture. It is in this context that Agricultural Data IG (IGAD) was born (in 2013) as a forum for sharing experience and providing visibility to research and work in agricultural data.

IGAD has launched a number of domain-specific IGAD Working Groups (WGs) that are examining the current status, trends and outlook of different interconnected data issues, making important contributions towards effectiveness of agricultural data and agrisemantics both at regional and at continental levels.

In particular, IGAD promotes good practices (recommendations, use cases, standards, research outputs) with regard to data sharing policies, data management plans, and data interoperability.

The Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative supports its partners to join IGAD and participate actively to work on open data, data interoperability and capacity development. Moreover, GODAN is actively promoting the membership of IGAD WGs to its partners and some will function as GODAN WGs.

Among many points of discussion during the IGAD pre-meeting - in which will participate more than 110 data experts from more than 35 countries ! - this event will be also the springboard for the official launching of two new groups such as: the Joint Building Synergies in Capacity Development Discussion Group and Metrics and indicators in agricultural science Discussion Group.  

The conclusions of the IGAD pre-meeting will be brought to the 9th RDA Plenary Meeting at the Agricultural Data Interest Group Session on Wednesday, 5th April from 11:30 to 13:00.

The IGAD pre-meeting will be a unique opportunity for all participants to enrich and share their knowledge and experiences, aiming at:

• enhancing societal impact of open agricultural research;
• reducing digital divides so that researchers in developing countries can mostly benefit from IGAD outputs,

thus contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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Check out also:

IGAD Pre-Meeting in Denver (United States) during the RDA P8