International Data Week

This collection highlights research, practice, and opinions presented during International Data Week (IDW). IDW is a collaboration between CODATA, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and the World Data System (WDS). It is a roughly biennial event that features the SciDataCon research conference of CODATA and WDS in conjunction with the working sessions of an RDA Plenary.

The first IDW was held 11-17 September 2016 in Denver Colorado, USA. The second was 5-8 November 2018 in Gaborone, Botswana. Future conferences are currently being planned for 2021 and 2023. See www.internationaldataweek.org

IDW seeks to advance the frontiers of data in all areas of research, acknowledging that the most significant contemporary research challenges— including those reaching across disciplines—cannot be properly addressed without due attention to data-related issues. These include policy frameworks, data quality and interoperability, long-term stewardship of data, and the research skills, technologies, standards, and infrastructures required by increasingly data-intensive research. They also include frontier challenges for data science: e.g. fundamental research questions relating to data integration, analysis of complex systems and models, infrastructure development, epistemology and ethics in relation to Big Data, etc. The transformative effect of the data revolution should be examined from the perspective of all fields of research, and its relationship to broader societal developments and to data-driven innovation scrutinised. These issues create a multi-faceted challenge which cannot be tackled without expertise drawn across disciplines and diverse roles in the research community, stating nationally, but moving internationally and globally, for the benefit of us all.