WorldFAIR and a Festival of Data - Looking back on 2022 and forward to 2023: a report on CODATA activities and achievements

WorldFAIR and a Festival of Data, looks back on 2022 and forward to 2023.  It provides a report on CODATA activities and achievements and highlights the most important upcoming events.

2022 has been another busy and successful year for the CODATA community.  We are very grateful for your committed collaboration and engagement with our mission.  As a global, membership organisation, CODATA depends on the generosity of our funders and collaborators and the often voluntary efforts of committee, Task Group and Working Group members.  

In 2023, the International Data Week theme will be ‘a festival of data’ and an occasion to celebrate the richness and diversity of our community.  That starts with this expression of gratitude.  We are very fortunate to have an extremely committed group of Officers and Executive Committee members, dynamic leadership throughout our various initiatives and a secretariat that works beyond the call of duty.  Through all these factors, and more, CODATA is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts and achieves a great deal more than our budget would suggest.

As is customary, we would like to provide a summary of activities and achievements and take the opportunity to alert you to events in the coming year.  This is a genuinely exciting time, as we see the vision for a Decadal Programme on Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges begin to come into fruition with the WorldFAIR project, a set of related Case Studies, and important work on units, vocabularies and a Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework.  Also notable is new impetus and direction for our International Data Policy Committee and the new International Programme Office to support the Open Science initiatives.

The report published here ended up a bit longer than intended!  I hope it provides an informative and interesting snapshot of CODATA activities.  An updated version and a revised CODATA Strategy will be published in 2023 in preparation for our General Assembly, Salzburg, Austria, 27-28 October.