EUDAT 2nd Conference Training Tracks

A key benefit of a collaborative data infrastructure is the opportunities it offers for moving (replicating, uploading) data more easily for a variety of purposes such as preservation, access optimisation, to improve sharing, and to prepare data for processing. Data is precious: particularly that which corresponds to observations of real-life systems (such as seismic activity, ocean temperatures, observations about species and languages/cultures) that may not be reproducible.  In these cases, having reliable, off-site copies of your data can be invaluable. Also, sharing of data between scientists, organisations and disciplines is becoming more common, and provides possibilities of new approaches to problems by bringing together data from multiple sources. Finally, in order to have data readily available for computation or analysis it needs to be moved from where it is stored, to where it is processed (and back again). All of these use cases require that data can be moved efficiently and reliably. This session covers some of the technologies and techniques that can be used to do this, and will also discuss these in the context of EUDAT. After attending this session, you will know which technologies uses to provide its Data staging, Safe replication and SimpleStore services and how they are used. You will know the benefits of using these services, and have learned what the underlying technologies provide to help with moving of data. You will know how these EUDAT building blocks could be integrated with existing services.

 

In this session we’ll review how PIDs can be used, and we will discuss how the handle system can be used with a type registry to provide functionality beyond basic handle resolution. The session will also include a hands-on tutorial on the use of the EPIC API which can be used to construct or interact with the EPIC Handle service.

Metadata is going to serve increasingly more functions. Traditionally it is used for finding useful data and tools. In future it will be increasingly often used for scientific purposes and for orchestrating scientific workflows. It is therefore not surprising that metadata remains the focus of discussions and deservedly affords the attention of the Research Data Alliance. Data is really only of use in research when its context and provenance is understood. Context such as when it was created, who it was created by, to what it relates, how it was created and how it can be used is even more vital to understand once data has been stored or shared. Metadata provides this context and is key to being able to make the most of data by making it findable, understandable and reusable. This session covers the principles of Metadata, introduces important metadata efforts such as Dublin Core, ISO standards and in particular community based solutions to foster science and compares approaches such as the use of fixed schema and meta models. It will also discuss what the intentions and architectures of major initiatives such as EUDAT, DataONE, Europeana are, how the work in this area is carried out, how one can participate in the EUDAT services and how MD services can be used. We’ll also show how Metadata is used in EUDAT’s SimpleStore and how this has been built on Invenio.