Research Communities

Johannes Peterseil is the Deputy Head of the Department of Ecosystem Research & Environmental Information Management at the Environment Agency Austria (Umweltbundesamt GmbH, Austria) and leads the data management team within the department. Johannes is also the current lead of the Expert Panel on Information Management in the European Long-term Ecosystem Research Network (LTER-Europe). The panel is working on the development of the data infrastructure for LTER-Europe and their main job is to coordinate a multi-national team working on this issue. The requirements for this infrastructure have been defined by the research community within LTER-Europe. This has led to the implementation work, which is being funded by a number of projects on a European scale, including EUDAT. Within the Environment Agency Austria, the team working on this topic is composed of biologists and information technology (IT) experts addressing the interface between data provision and data usage. EUDAT recently interviewed Johannes to find out how LTER-Europe will be using the EUDAT data management services to help establish the LTER-Europe infrastructure.

Leading European initiatives, EUDAT, LIBER, OpenAIRE, EGI and GÉANT share their joint vision for the European Open Science Cloud for Research which includes eight elements of success for a concrete contribution to the Digital Single Market. The Open Science Cloud, part of the European Commission’s Digital Single Market Strategy, will empower research data sharing, data stewardship and data reuse in Europe for the benefit of innovation and growth. Today’s joint statement sets out the partners’ strategic vision for the Open Science Cloud’s organisation, sustainability and governance as a contribution towards the practical realisation of the EC’s vision...

VPH (http://vph-portal.eu) was funded by the European Union (EU) with the goal of making collaborative investigation of the human body possible across all the relevant scales (from the level of molecules through cells and organs to the whole body). VPH is currently using EUDAT services to store data safely and to move it from where it is stored to the supercomputer resources where complex calculations are performed. More specifically, VPH is using B2SAFE to ingest VPH data sets into EUDAT resources for preservation purposes, and also to replicate of our data across multiple EUDAT nodes in order to make it easier to access the data and also make it safer (in case one copy of a particular set of data is lost or damaged).

This month EUDAT interviewed Dieter Van Uytvanck, the Technical Director for CLARIN ERIC, to find out about CLARIN’s ongoing work integrating its infrastructure with the EUDAT common data services. Dieter is based at Utrecht University where he is responsible for the construction and maintenance of CLARIN’s technical infrastructure. Dieter and the teams at the 31 CLARIN centres are working together with a group of central developers to connect language resources and tools so researchers in the humanities and social science can easily access and make use of these valuable resources.

René van Horik is based in The Hague where he is the EUDAT project coordinator at the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) institute, which is part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). René is coordinating the EUDAT training programme and in this article he introduces us to DANS and its mission.

Interview with Alberto Michelini, Director of the National Earthquake Center of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), Italy EUDAT is primarily designed to provide data services for European researchers (although naturally we want to make the data available for world-wide research, wherever appropriate). We have to address the needs of both researchers and members of the general public who are producing or using very large data sets for research purposes. A typical example of this kind of data comes from the continuous series of observations recorded by our networks of seismic stations over time, or from waveform simulations of earthquakes...