Multi-Stakeholder Data Bridges: making data work for cross-domain grand challenges

Organiser(s): CODATA; the Committee on Data of the International Science Council
(SP.1356)

Solving today’s global grand challenges demands that science and policy embrace data innovations, synergies, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Therefore, the International Science Council, acting as the global voice for science, is launching the CODATA Decadal Programme, and seeks the collaboration of UN partners and other stakeholders in this initiative. The Programme will build the international communities of practice needed to enhance and harmonise digital and data capacity across science and policy, and mutually reinforce one another’s ability to respond to emerging opportunities and threats. Indeed, the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic is demonstrating both the power of data-driven science-policy dialogues and exchanges, and also the need for improvement to face future challenges as a global community.

Creating a two-way, digital bridge between scientific research and official monitoring is vital to enable scientifically grounded policy, and translation of society’s needs to science. New techniques for data mobility—getting the data when and where needed—and analysis that leverage huge amounts of data and information, from both traditional and new sources, are revolutionising this space. However, progress is impeded by a lack of interoperability in digital formats, semantic conventions, and metadata standards—and by a lack of capacity.
A plethora of formats and semantic conventions and weak metadata impede progress and create barriers to employ new data-intensive techniques. We do not need new standards, classifications, and technology approaches, so much as we need to make those we already have work together effectively through multi-stakeholder partnerships on a broad scale.

Within the CODATA Decadal Programme, these digital divides are being bridged through a series of multi-stakeholder workshops, projects and case studies. Use cases cover themes such as urban resilience, disaster risk reduction, and infectious diseases (including HIV in Africa and responses to COVID-19). These efforts are producing early draft guidelines—grounded in the FAIR data principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability—to align communities of practice as they make use of multi-domain data.

Building on existing technical standards such as DDI and SDMX, on the wealth of semantic technologies from the W3C and elsewhere, and on machine-learning and data science techniques, the Decadal Programme will bring an inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to how we manage, combine and use data. This session will provide an overview of these efforts, and provide guidance on how to interface with the ISC CODATA initiative.