The International Science Council’s Committee on Data (CODATA) and partners are convening a virtual session ‘Multi-Stakeholder Data Bridges II – Making data work for cross-domain grand challenges’ at the 2021 United Nations World Data Forum.
Solving today’s global grand challenges demands that both scientific and policy research embrace new innovations and synergies as well as multi-stakeholder partnerships. To help build the bridges needed between different data ecosystem domains and communities and to increase large-scale usability of data across the scientific and policy spheres, the International Science Council, acting as the global voice for science and working with the United Nations, has determined the need to launch the CODATA Decadal Programme ‘Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges’. 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.
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated both the power of data-driven science-policy dialogues and exchanges, but 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 and analysis that leverage huge amounts of data and information, from both traditional and new sources, are revolutionizing this space. They require a massively increased use of data from both traditional and new sources. The plethora of formats and semantics and the scarcity of metadata create barriers to employing the new data-intensive techniques. We do not need new standards, new classifications, and new technology approaches, so much as we need to make those we already have work together effectively through multi-stakeholder partnerships on a broad scale.
This 2021 session builds on one with the same title in the 2020 virtual forum. As well as showcasing and discussing progress with the objectives described, it also features new speakers from related initiatives.
New developments and updates will include:
● The UN Data Standards for United Nations system-wide reporting of financial data (the “Data Cube”).
● Work in the context of the Oceans Decade on SDGs to develop and harmonize ontologies to bridge between a number of UN Agencies.
● The finalization and publication of the UNDRR-ISC Hazard Information Profiles, and the governance, maintenance, and technical presentation of this essential resource for the Sendai process.
● The innovative new work of the ALPHA network, as part of an IRDC project, to combine demographic, health and clinical data for COVID-19, and to provide an ML-enhanced dashboard and visualizations for policymakers.
The session will conclude with a presentation on progress in good practice and harmonisation of semantic products (vocabularies, ontologies, metadata profiles): the multi-stakeholder bridges needed to make data work.
See CODATA’s announcement of the event here.
See the UN World Data Forum Programme here.
