Enhancing Semantic Interoperability in Environmental Health Sciences Research

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is leading a community-driven initiative to advance integrative environmental health sciences (EHS) research by developing and promoting adoption of a harmonized language. This initiative will facilitate answering large-scale complex research questions that require integration of multiple disparate data sources by developing standards for describing EHS data and biomedical knowledge.

To begin the process of community development, NIEHS is hosting a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at an upcoming Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary on

Enhancing Semantic Interoperability in Environmental Health Sciences Research
Wed., April 21, 11-12:30pm EST
Register - £150 (early bird ends April 2) and £250 (starting April 3)
Plenary Program

This BoF session is the first of several events that NIEHS will host related to this initiative (stay tuned for further information). Although the official kick-off will happen in late June, we want to take advantage of the upcoming RDA meeting to gauge interest from RDA members, introduce the EHS community to RDA, and explore whether the RDA platform would be a suitable infrastructure hub for our community.

We hope you will join the RDA session as well as learn more about the many data-focused activities of RDA.  

What is RDA?

For those of you new to RDA, it is an international community-driven organization with the mission to “build the social and technical bridges to enable open sharing and re-use of data to accelerate data-driven innovation.” Through Interest Groups and Working Groups, its members exchange knowledge, discuss barriers and potential solutions, explore and define policies, and harmonize standards to facilitate global data sharing and re-use. As such, RDA’s activities and outputs strongly align with NIH’s interest to improve data management, data sharing, and data interoperability to maximize the value of NIH data.