Federation partner
Research Data Alliance
The Research Data Alliance is a federation of working groups, not a single standards body. Several of those groups produce vocabularies and recommendations that intersect directly with CASRAI assets.
What RDA is
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is an international, member-driven organisation that convenes working groups and interest groups across the research-data domain. Its outputs are recommendations and supporting outputs rather than formal standards: working groups operate on fixed terms (typically 18 months) and produce documents that the community adopts on a voluntary basis. RDA's role in the CASRAI federation is therefore plural — different groups own different threads.
Groups of direct relevance
DMP Common Standard
The DMP Common Standard working group produced a machine-actionable data management plan model that has been adopted by several DMP tools (DMPTool, DMPonline, Argos). The model overlaps substantially with the RDM-facing portions of the CASRAI Catalogue and with the Research Data Management Terminology stewarded by CODATA. Cross-walking the DMP Common Standard against the Catalogue is one of the live alignment tasks on the cross-walks page.
FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS)
FAIR4RS is the joint RDA / ReSA / FORCE11 working group that produced the FAIR Principles for Research Software — an adaptation of the original FAIR data principles for the software case. Where CASRAI vocabulary touches software outputs (in the Catalogue, in dataset and software deposit examples, and in the contributorType cross-walk with DataCite) the FAIR4RS principles are the reference framework.
PIDINST — Persistent Identifiers for Instruments
PIDINST defined the metadata schema and identifier model for research instruments. Instruments are an under-modelled object in most CRIS systems and the schema fills a real gap. The relevance to CASRAI is that the Catalogue's element coverage is being extended to include instrument metadata; PIDINST is the canonical source for the field definitions.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group
The Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group sustains the work around the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics. CARE sits alongside FAIR in any contemporary RDM vocabulary that aims to be usable in jurisdictions with Indigenous data sovereignty obligations. The CODATA Research Data Management Terminology references the CARE principles, and the cross-walks page records the linkage.
How CASRAI federates with RDA
- Cross-walks between CASRAI vocabularies and the DMP Common Standard, FAIR principles, FAIR4RS, PIDINST, and CARE are maintained on the cross-walks reference page.
- Where an RDA recommendation supersedes earlier CASRAI working-group output, the canonical reference is the RDA document and the CASRAI page links out.
- RDA plenaries continue to be a forum where the federation partners (NISO, euroCRIS, CODATA) meet face-to-face; informal coordination of the kind described in the 2020 joint statement happens there.
Why RDA matters in this story
CASRAI never had RDA's convening power. When the consortium wound down, the working-group convening function was the one piece that no single steward picked up — see the note in the CASRAI history about what survived and what did not. RDA partially fills that gap by hosting the working groups where the next generation of RDM vocabulary is built. The federation pages on this site therefore treat RDA as a peer rather than a steward: it does not hold a CASRAI asset, but it shapes the environment in which the assets are used.
