4th EPIC User Meeting - A Satellite of the 2nd EUDAT Conference

Ulrich Schwardmann, GWDG

The European Persistent Identifier Consortium EPIC (see http://www.pidconsortium.eu) was founded in 2009 by a group of European partners in order to provide persistent identifier (PID) services for the European Research Community based on the handle system and allowing for the allocation and resolution of persistent identifiers. The consortium currently consists of the following EUDAT partners: CSC (in Espoo near Helsinki, Finland), DKRZ (in Hamburg, Germany), Surf-SARA (in Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and GWDG (in Germany). These members have all signed a Memorandum of Understanding aiming to ensure long term reliability for the PID services they are providing.

The EPIC Consortium will be holding its 4th User Meeting on 30 October in conjunction with the 2nd EUDAT conference. This user meeting (see http://www.pidconsortium.eu/index.php?page=activities/2013_uf) provides an important interface between the people who use the EPIC PIDs and the EPIC consortium partners (which function mainly as service providers).  As such, the workshop offers a platform for the exchange of experiences and user requirements.

The workshop will kick off with a short session featuring reports about ongoing internal issues (such as governance, cooperative ventures, reliability and the performance of systems), as well as further planned developments. Some actual and possible usage scenarios will be covered in talks about the requirements of PIDs for open time series, PIDs and data replication in EUDAT, information types and collections, and versioning. Afterwards we will also have some time for feedback from users, and open questions. In particular, we will address the important issue: how one can become involved with and contribute to the success of EPIC.

This user meeting is open to everyone interested in the EPIC consortium and PID usage, but you need to register in order to attend (see https://s-lotus.gwdg.de/gwdgdb/age/epic_2013.nsf/registration). Please note that this workshop is free for those attending the 2nd EUDAT Conference.