Agenda of the pre-meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD)

As we announced in this group, the Food and Agriculture Societal Challenge BDE Workshop will follow the pre-meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD), which will take place on September 21st-22nd in Paris.

We are now pleased to share with all of you the Agricultural Data Interest Group (IGAD) Pre-Meeting Agenda.

In this pre-meeting we will dedicate about 1 and ½ days to intensive discussions and interactions. There will be five discussion groups around the following topics:

• Group 1.- Assess and find ways to increase participation from universities, government and research organizations in the Agricultural sector worldwide, chaired by Imma Subirats (FAO of the UN, Italy)
• Group 2.- Institutional issues: how to get policies on openness and good data management adopted and implemented?, chaired by Hugo Besemer (Wageningen University, The Netherlands)
• Group 3.- Increase data access and availability (formats, users), chaired by Cyril Pommier (INRA, France)
• Group 4.- Interoperability (policies, tools, taxonomies, standards), chaired by Valeria Pesce (GFAR, Italy)
• Group 5.-  Soil Data Working Group, chaired by Pandi Zdruli (Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Bari, Italy) and Devika Madalli (ISI, India)

The conclusions of this pre-meeting will be brought to the 6^th RDA Plenary Session IGAD Meeting during the Agricultural Data Interest Group Session on 25 September by the chairs of each discussion group. The final objectives of these deliberations are:

• identifying the most important topics for WG to work on
• forging collaborations among the members
• leveraging and using the RDA platform to function, report and plan outreach of the results.