News Bulletin July-August 2013

Welcome to the summer vacation edition of the EUDAT News Bulletin! These email bulletins are sent, roughly once a month, to keep you updated about the latest news and developments from EUDAT.

The last few weeks have been particularly exciting for EUDAT as we are now ramping up the first set of EUDAT services to be launched as part of the Collaborative Data Infrastructure. These services, which will be presented in detail at the next EUDAT conference, will position EUDAT in the e-Infrastructure landscape as the domain of registered and described data allowing research communities to better manage and preserve their data, and to make this data more visible (and available) to others.

EUDAT's initial storage, computing and metadata services will be appealing to large research communities - typically the ESFRI ones - who need a robust solution to replicate and optimize access to their data across disciplines and geographical borders. But we are also ensuring that these services can be used just as easily by small research groups, individual researchers, and the so-called "citizen scientists" who simply want to share data with others in a simple way, without having to install new equipment or modify their working environment. We are making this possible by offering different platforms and technology solutions which allow everyone to make the most of EUDAT based on their own existing infrastructure organization and requirements.

While we are preparing for the release of the first set of services, we are also already planning the next set. In September we will launch new working groups focusing on semantic services, dynamic data, workflows, and data access and re-use policies. We will be holding a meeting gathering experts from Europe and the US (representing more than 30 research communities and institutions altogether) on 25-26 September in Barcelona to address these topics at length, with a view to developing new common services.

From the very beginning, EUDAT has been driven by the strong involvement of research communities who participate fully in the design of all the services in the project (Read about our user engagement approach here). There are many reasons to be interested in EUDAT and to get concretely involved in this outstanding initiative! For regular news and updates on our activities, follow us at our website www.eudat.eu, which includes social media such as Twitter and Facebook. If you or some members of your community want to test a service, or join our pool of experts, please send e-mail to eudat-info@postit.csc.fi or get in touch with one of our representatives at one of the many meetings and conferences that EUDAT will be attending over the summer and into the autumn - for example, INCF 2013 in Stockholm , the 41st EPOS workshop in Erice, iPRES-2013 in Lisbon, the pre-RDA meeting in Munich, and the EuroRis-Net+ high-level training in Athens.

The role of industry in e-infrastructures is an important issue, but one that involves many as yet unanswered questions. We will be addressing many of these challenges in special industry sessions at the 2nd EUDAT Conference (Rome, 28-30 October). For more information about this, see http://www.eudat.eu/blog/industry-involvement-eudat-2nd-conference.

EUDAT has organised various forthcoming training courses and events. You will find a selection of dates for your diary below. And, to keep up-to-date with all our training activities or download material from previous events, please visit http://www.eudat.eu/training.

EUDAT Training @ CSC - IT Center for Science
10-12 September, Helsinki, Finland
EUDAT in conjunction with PRACE will be offering a free course on Data Staging and Data Movement to demonstrate how to use EUDAT services with the PRACE infrastructure. The course will cover tools and techniques for moving data on, off and between high performance computers and community data repositories. As well as presenting the general principles, the course will cover the data management tools and services developed by EUDAT, and focus specifically on their use within the PRACE infrastructure. For more details, see http://www.eudat.eu/events/data-staging-and-data-movement and http://events.prace-ri.eu/conferenceDisplay.py?ovw=True&confId=182.

EUDAT Training @ The 2nd EUDAT Conference
28 October 2013, Rome, Italy
The first day of the 2nd EUDAT Conference will be devoted to training on various topics related to EUDAT's services. We expect to cover topics such as Dynamic Data, PIDs and EUDAT's Data Services. The training is an integral part of the conference and is included in the conference fee. More details, including details of how to register, are available at http://www.eudat.eu/training/training-day-2nd-eudat-conference.