Rice data interoperability working group updates

The challenge of increasing rice harvest to produce an additional 104 million tons of milled rice by 2040, beyond the expected 2015 harvest of 475 million tons, requires concerted effort from rice researchers in order to achieve a major leap in rice research technology to address the target yield increase. Modern rice breeding is now beginning to use high-throughput technologies (eg. genome sequencing, single-nucleotide polymorphism markers, phenomics, rapid generation advance, imaging by drones) that generate large quantities of data in basic, applied and adaptive research in rice sector. However, using these resources comprehensively, taking advantage of the associated cross-disciplinary research opportunities is a major challenge to both domain scientists and information technologists, and a global rice research coordination/cooperation would greatly benefit from a community framework/ standard to easily exchange research data across the globe. Through a meeting last February 2016 of the Interest Group on Agriculture Data of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) in collaboration with GODAN, the Rice Research Data Interoperability Working Group  (RDI WG) was formed, the case statement was submitted, and is now formally recognized and endorsed by RDA.  RDI WG intends to produce a set of guidelines on how to make rice research data easily shareable, reusable and interoperable in terms of functionalities and data types. The proposed common framework will help in describing, representing, linking and publishing rice data with respect to open standards. Implementing the framework will help cultivate a rice research ecosystem with people familiar with interoperability, organisations ready to collaborate, and common tools and services available. On the legal and policy aspects of the underlying data and data interoperability methods, RDI WG will utilize existing policies in place in the respective organizations regarding data access, and will adopt the recommendations and outcomes of RDA – CODATA Working Group on Legal Interoperability of Research Data. The work will directly align with the ongoing initiatives of hundreds of rice research organizations (including International Rice Research Institute and Africa Rice). In the approved case statement, RDI WG aims to : Produce a report on the survey of existing standards among rice research and development organizations, with focus on data availability, accessibility and applicability, formats, ontology, standards and metadata used, and do a complete analysis of interoperability (if in place) among rice databases and repositories. Provide a set of recommendations on good practices, ontologies, tools and examples to create, manage and share data related to rice (based on the existing Wheat Data Interoperability Guidelines). RDI WG will identify and adopt WDI components relevant to rice data,  customize accordingly, and add new types of data as discovered from the survey. The expected output is a Rice Data Framework specification (cookbook) Evaluate prototype(s) on Rice specific data registry (RDA Persistent ID Types and Data Type Registry WGs as initial models), and make recommendations on how to develop this type of tools, and disseminated as good practices. Make recommendations for a Rice ontology that should align existing rice ontologies, thesauri, controlled vocabularies, which could be the basis on multi-lingual conversion of ontologies  (but not a deliverable of RDI WG) Recommend best practices/method(s) for digitization of rice legacy data (using India's data repository as initial model). In this talk, updates on the 5 deliverables of RDI WG will be presented.