As part of The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) meeting focusing on IGAD/RDA : Sharing Experiences and Creating Digital Dialogues, Medha Devare (CGIAR) presented a webinar during the ‘Semantics’ group of presentations on May 26. 

The webinar focused on ‘An overview of data management, processing, and analytical tools and services.’ COVID-19 has shown that Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data assets are the building blocks for data-driven, collaborative and agile crisis response and resilience over the long term. Responding rapidly and effectively to disruptions in agriculture similarly hinges around enabling discovery of and access to publications, data, and data products that are interpretable and interoperable – for humans and machines. 

This is also a critical piece of the strategy for enhancing the impact of research and development in the agricultural domain in general, and for catalyzing innovation in our efforts to fuel a “translational agriculture” revolution. There is a strong model in the biomedical sector to achieve seamless discoverability, interlinkages and interoperability across their data resources. Guided by this, CGIAR’s Big Data Platform has developed and/or curated several openly available solutions to enable good data management practices leading to the generation of open and FAIR data assets, along with tools to access them, and an analytical environment and other services to more seamlessly and ethically process and derive insight from data. This talk will provide an overview of these as a response to a potential data gap in this moment of crisis coupled with an increased recognition of the importance of open, human and machine interoperable data through the systematic use of these tools and services.

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) meeting was set to be held in Rome (Italy) in April 2020 but instead, took place as a virtual meeting from May 25 to 28.  The virtual meeting provided an online platform to continue to build upon collaborations, knowledge sharing and developing innovations with activities including panel sessions, group discussions and presentations.