Initial Work for the ISC CODATA Decadal Programme


This page is for the initial work for the ISC CODATA Decadal Programme on 'Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges'.

Scope and Background

Scope and Background

To face many of today’s global grand challenges, data is needed from different domains and disciplines, and from different institutional levels, and it must be interoperable to be useful. Research projects in such fields, whether for policy or scientific purposes, often involve the use of data from a wide variety of sources, ranging from specific, local data sets to those supplied by higher-level national and international organizations. A huge proportion of research effort is expended to integrate and harmonize this data so that a meaningful analysis can be conducted.

Global grand challenges require data coming from a wide range of domains and institutional levels, presenting us with diverse issues:

  • Semantics, classifications, and terminology must be clear not only across domains and national boundaries, but also vertically within chains of data reporting and use

  • Metadata specifications for different purposes must be comprehensible at a computational as well as human-readable level, requiring both harmonization/alignment and better machine-actionable models and techniques

  • The provenance and processing of data must be made explicit in a fashion which supports further computation, enabling machine reproducibility of findings

  • The connection between scientific micro-data and official statistics at the national and international level must be strengthened, to improve both usability and quality for policy and scientific researchers alike

It is widely recognised that the challenge of making data FAIR and combining data within domains and for cross-domain research is one of the major obstacles to scientific progress: it is costly, it inhibits reproducibility and retards discovery. A lot of work is going on in a number of domains, and you are undoubtedly already involved in some related initiatives. The ISC CODATA Decadal Programme has a number of features which we think add value to existing work.

  • There are many calls to build consensus and to encourage coordination between initiatives. This is an attempt precisely to do that, endorsed by the International Science Council, which has called on CODATA to work with partners to this end. 

  • The approach taken in this activity aims to help address the challenges of interoperability by reference to specific use cases which have been identified by pilot activities over the past two years. It is hoped in this way to provide concrete applications for ongoing work and to build partnerships between those on the technology and semantics side and those on the science and policy side.

Working Groups

Working Groups

Four initial Working Groups emerged from discussions at the Dagstuhl workshop in 2019 on “Interoperability of Metadata Standards in Cross-Domain Science, Health, and Social Science Applications”.

Workshop

Workshop

A third Dagstuhl workshop on “Interoperability of Metadata Standards in Cross-Domain Science, Health, and Social Science Applications” in 2020 will act as a face-to-face meeting and as a sprint for the working groups, following and augmenting their online collaboration.