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From September to November 2013, EUDAT invited the community to provide their feedback and thoughts on a series of new services currently under discussion as a future set of data solutions. 123 people from over 17 countries completed the survey, providing interesting and useful insight into community needs and requirements. The majority of the respondents were researchers and scientists and infrastructure providers and computer scientists but a good proportion represented funding and policy maker organisations.
The first section of the survey focused on Data and Metadata Services to replicate and integrate data into the safe and registered data domain of EUDAT in a number of different ways including the Joint Metadata Catalogue – which resulted in being the most popular with the Safe Replication service coming a very close second. EUDAT Box (Dropbox like service) was also in the top three of the eight services proposed.
The Lifecycle section of the survey saw the Data Lifecycle Support (automatically guiding the creation, transformation and adaptation of data objects in such a way that all objects are associated with PIDs and metadata, their relation and provenance is stored, and that all relevant information is registered (making it discoverable and accessible)) proposal as being the most popular by far.
From the point-of-view of Registries/PID/AAI, strong interest lies in having Stable PID Support, in other words a stable system to register and resolve persistent identifiers for all data objects allowing data objects to be identified, and making it possible to prove the integrity of the data objects, refer to them and guarantee persistent access to them.
The section on Working Groups (Data access and re-use policies, Dynamic Data, Semantic Services & Workflows) underlined the community interest in these four areas. With a significant number of the respondents interested in being actively involved in the discussions. These working groups are being actively taken forward by EUDAT and details and updates can be found at http://www.eudat.eu/working-groups
A complete analysis of the survey responses will be included in the Data Management Landscape Characteristics and Community Requirements deliverable to be published early in 2014.