As a prelude to our recent Annual Meeting, held this year at The Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) in Barcelona, TiMet hosted a workshop attended by the leaders of eight other projects and nine industry stakeholders, all involved in EU FP7 projects funded under the KBBE (knowledge-based bio-economy) call. The purpose was to forge new relationships, establish the value of sharing information across domains, identify common knowledge needs, and take steps to close gaps in the knowledge translation process. Key themes emerging from the workshop included the development of data standards for plant systems biology, and a system for locating and sharing data that emerge from the participating projects. We took ‘data’ to mean whatever project outputs are useful to share online: data, models, protocols, seed catalogues, etc. We anticipate that Horizon 2020 will include opportunities to develop these areas. Establishing shared understanding now will be extremely helpful in preparing for these future calls.