  The Research Data Alliance (RDA, https://www.rd-alliance.org/) aims at
enabling research data sharing without barriers. It was founded in March 2013
by the Australian Government, the European Commission, and the USA NSF and
NIST. It is a bottom-up organisation which after 2 years and a half of
existence gathers around 3,000 members from 100 different countries. Work in
RDA is organised in a bottom-up way, through Working Groups and Interest Groups
proposed by the community. These Groups can deal with any aspect of research
data sharing, which means a huge diversity in the activities. Some scientific
communities use the RDA as a neutral place to hold the discussions about their
disciplinary interoperability framework. Astronomy has the IVOA and the FITS
Committee for that purpose, and the ADASS Colloquia to deal with astronomical
data systems. But many RDA topics are of interest for us, for instance data
citation, including citation of dynamic data bases and data repositories, or
certification of data repositories. Also lessons learnt in building the IVOA
and data sharing in astronomy are injected in the discussion of RDA
organisation and procedures. The RDA is a unique platform to meet data
practitioners from many countries, disciplines and profiles, to grasp ideas to
improve our data practices, to identify topics of common interest and to raise
interesting subjects for discussion involving specialists from many disciplines
and countries by proposing new Interest and Working Groups.
