For the first time GODAN will be officially be present at RDA in collaboration with the Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) and Tokyo University. At the official plenary from March 1-3, GODAN and  IGAD will have a session on advocacy for open research data and on inter-operability activities by GODAN partners. The main goals of this Joint Session:

• To streamline the collaboration between Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative
• To solicit and promote interactions and projects between both initiatives particularly in the areas of advocating of openness on research data in agriculture and nutrition and building infrastructures for open data
• To explore how to achieve better data interoperability in agriculture and nutrition

In addition to the Plenary session, GODAN is also co organizing a pre-meeting from the 28-29th of February.  It aims to provide an opportunity to evaluate how the group has evolved during the last months, what are the latest developments and to focus on research data management in agriculture in Asia. The pre-meeting will showcase and discuss rice research data in the context of open data. In this pre-meeting,  one and a half days will be dedicated to intensive discussions and interactions. Four four discussion groups are currently proposed around the following topics:

• Agricultural Data Interoperability (policies, tools, taxonomies, ontology, standards)
• Increase data access and availability (formats, users)
• Advocacy for research data.
• Adoption of RDA outputs by the agricultural community (e.g. present existing RDA deliverables relevant to the Agricultural Research Community, discuss how to facilitate their uptake)
• Rice & other crop Research Data Interoperability

The conclusions of this pre-meeting will be brought to the 7th RDA Plenary Session IGAD Meeting during the Agricultural Data Interest Group Session by the chairs of each discussion group.