RDA's Wheat Data Interoperability working group is comprised of members from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and other agriculture-related organizations. The group's objective is to build an integrated Wheat information system for the international community of wheat researchers, growers and breeders. With approximately three-quarters of all U.S. grain products made from wheat flour, advancing and sustaining wheat-related science is critical and finding ways to improve the sharing of data is an important first step.

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Francine Berman, chair of Research Data Alliance/U.S.

Credit: Fran Berman

Giridhar Manepalli from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives speaks at RDA's 4th Plenary meeting in Amsterdam.

Credit: Inge Angevaare

A good example of the infrastructure RDA is developing is the Data Type Registries, an effort to make it easier to create machine-readable and researcher-accessible data by creating an archive of common data structures that researchers can turn to when deciding how to organize their data. The creation of such a registry will support the accurate use of data to reproduce experiments, confirm findings and interoperate among data sets. Formed at the first RDA Plenary in early 2013, the Data Type Registries working group has collaborated during the last year to develop and test its new system. The infrastructure products of this group are already being adopted by European Data Infrastructure, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States and other groups who are applying it to their own research activities.

Credit: Daan Broeder, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics