1. EUDAT Towards a European Collaborative Data Infrastructure
Mark van de Sanden – SARA, The Netherlands
EGI TF, Lyon, 19 September 2011
(slides from Damien Carpentier, CSC)

2. Outline of the talk
Problem description - Current data infrastructure landscape
EUDAT project
Expected benefits and challenges of a CDI

3. The current data infrastructure landscape: challenges and opportunities
Long history of data management in Europe: several existing data infrastructures dealing with established and growing user communities (e.g., ESO, ESA, EBI, CERN)
New Research Infrastructures are emerging and are also trying to build data infrastructure solutions to meet their needs (CLARIN, EPOS, ELIXIR, ESS, etc.)
A large number of projects providing excellent data services (EURO-VO, GENESI-DR, Geo-Seas, HELIO, IMPACT, METAFOR, PESI, SEALS, etc.)
However, most of these infrastructures and initiatives address primarily the needs of a specific discipline and user community
Challenges
Compatibility, interoperability, and cross-disciplinary research
Data growth in volume and complexity (the so-called “data tsunami”)
strong impact on costs threatening the sustainability of the infrastructure
Opportunities
Potential synergies do exist: although disciplines have different ambitions, they have common basic needs and requirements that could be matched with generic pan-European services supporting multiple communities and ensuring greater interoperability.
Strategy needed at pan-European level

4. EUDAT Key facts and objectives
Initiative funded through FP7 e-Infrastructure Call 9 (WP11): INFRA : Data infrastructure for e-Science (november 2010)
Call 9 Objective: ”Establish a peristent and robust service infrastructure for scientific data in Europe that responds to the need of data-intensive Science of 2020”
Budget 43M€
EUDAT selected for funding (three-year project)
Official starting date: 1st October 2011
Biggest budget of the call: 9,3 M€ EC Grant
Total Budget: 16,3 M€
Consortium
23 partners representing 13 countries
15 user communities from a wide range of disciplines (Biomed, Earth Science, Climate, SSH, etc.)
Targets
EUDAT objective: “To deliver a Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) with the capacity and capability for meeting researchers’ needs in a flexible and sustainable way, across geographical and disciplinary boundaries.”
The infrastructure must be Collaborative
The infrastructure must be driven by researchers’ needs
The infrastructure must be sustainable yet flexible
The infrastructure must be pan-European
The infrastructure must be multi-disciplinary

5. Towards a Collaborative Data Infrastructure
Source: HLEG report, p. 31
EUDAT will focus on building this generic data infrastructure layer and offer a trusted domain for long term data preservation accompanied with related services to store, identify, authenticate and mine these data.
This need be done in close collaboration with the Communities
Core services must match the requirements of the communities
Community services can also be incorporated into the common data service infrastructure when they are of use to other communities.

6. The EUDAT Consortium

7. The EUDAT Communities (by field)
Biological and Medical Science
VPH, ELIXIR, BBRMI, ECRIN
Environmental Science
ENES, EPOS, Lifewatch, EMSO, IAGOS-ERI, ICOS
Social Sciences and Humanities
CLARIN
Physical Sciences and Engineering
WLCG, ISIS
Material Science
ESS…
Energy
EUFORIA…
EUDAT targets all scientific disciplines (discipline neutral):
To enable the capture and identify cross-discipline requirements
To involving the scientists of all the communities in the shaping of the
infrastructure and its services

8. EUDAT core services
Core services are building blocks of EUDAT‘s Common Data Infrastructure
mainly included on bottom layer of data services
Fundamental Core Services
Long-term preservation
Persistent identifier service
Data access and upload
Workspaces
Web execution and workflow services
Single Sign On (federated AAI)
Monitoring and accounting services
Network services
Extended Core Services (community-supported)
Joint meta data service
Joint data mining service
No need to match the needs of all at the same time, addressing a group of communities can be very valuable, too

9. First Services available
EUDAT Timeline
1st User Forum
2nd User Forum
3rd User Forum
4th User Forum
EUDAT
Kick-Off
Sustainability Plan
Cross-
Community
Services
Full core
Services
deployed
First Services available
USER REQUIREMENTS
SERVICE DESIGN
SERVICE DEPLOYMENT
Service deployment
2012
2013
2014
2015

10. Expected benefits of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure
Enabling multi-disciplinary data intensive research and collaboration
Development of common services supporting research communities
Support to existing scientific communities’ infrastructures
Support to smaller communities through access to sophisticated services
Inter-disciplinary collaboration and exploitation of synergies between communities
Communities from different disciplines working together to build services
Data sharing between disciplines
Collaboration with other large-scale infrastructure
European e-Infrastructures: Géant, PRACE,EGI, etc.
Global initiatives in the US, Japan, Australia, etc.
Ensuring wide access to and preservation of data in a sustainable way
A robust generic infrastructure capable of handling the scale and complexity of data that will be generated over the next years
Greater access to existing data and better management of data for the future
Increased security by managing multiple copies in geographically distant locations
Put Europe in a competitive position for important data repositories of world-wide relevance
Economies of scale and cost-efficiency
Shared resources and work are less costly

11. Challenges and Opportunities
Delivering high level multi-disciplinary data services
Achieving a high level of interoperability in the context of diversity of data, research disciplines and practices
Need to strongly involve the different communities in the design and evaluation of services
EUDAT as a platform to discuss interoperability issues (along with other initiatives: e.g DAITF)
Building trust among stakeholders
Trust between service providers and users but also between the researchers and disciplines themselves
Trust in the EUDAT infrastructure, the data deposited and collected, data integrity
Ensuring the sustainaibility of the infrastructure
Providing a framework and a plan to ensure the continuity of services beyond the immediate funding window, through the setting up of a sustainable entity
Funding and business models
Parnerships (new communities, industry, etc.) and governance models

12. Thank You