Ensuring international and interdicipilinary interoperability of research data working groups

Interoperable tools for science is a great goal. Vision of seamless, shared and transparent scientific workflows, which can easily implement and automate processes across scientific fields and geographical domains gives hope for solving key scientific and societal challenges. 

However, we are not there yet. A lot of advances have been made, but there is no global agreement or a set of standards which enable such interoperability. Regional and national initiatives push towards diciplinary or regional open science environments, sharing some of the features of such true global interoperability, but often work in isolation - leading to danger of even more divergence of solutions. 

Science is global, and such discussions should be global. Scientific processes cover wide range of diciplines, practices and (science) cultural borders, and thus such solutions should be also shared across these boundaries. Modern science needs many kinds of experts, from traditional scientists to data stewards, software engineers and even policy developers and legal experts - and thus the interopebaility need to be considered also across the expert groups as well.

In this presentation I will present some of the tools currently available for such international development, specifically concentrating on the development and expertise from (now a decade-old!) Research Data Alliance. I will also present several other initiatives from regional (particularly European) and global importance, and discuss the ways a researcher or a research infrastructure developer could interact with them.