Content about standards

Last month, iSGTW attended the EUDAT Third Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. EUDAT is facilitating efficient research by contributing towards a collaborative data infrastructure in Europe. This will enable researchers to share data easily both within and between communities. It will also facilitate preservation of research data.

"The longer we wait, the more complex it becomes to solve the challenges around building the collaborative data infrastructure," says Kimmo Koski, managing director of Finland’s IT Center for Science (CSC), which is the organization coordinating the EUDAT project. "The time has come to do this now: Today’s global economic situation highlights the need for broad collaboration to solve these challenges."

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is set to hold its Fourth Plenary Meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, later this month. Hilary Hanahoe, the future coordinator of RDA Europe, tells iSGTW about the important work the organization has been carrying out in the run up to the event.

The Third EUDAT Conference will be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from 24-25 September. iSGTW talks to Per Oster about the event and the progress EUDAT is making in realizing its vision of a collaborative data infrastructure. Oster is director of research infrastructures at Finland’s IT Center for Science (CSC), which is the organization coordinating the EUDAT project.

With global data output growing rapidly, it is vital that researchers come together to build the social and technical bridges required to enable open sharing of research data. The organization charged with achieving this is the Research Data Alliance (RDA), which recently celebrated its first anniversary.

Last month, the RDA held a plenary meeting in Dublin, Ireland. The 497 attendees at the event engaged in discussion on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the role of publishers and persistent identifiers to heritage data and legal interoperability. Data applications discussed also included geospatial information, marine observation, food production, and urban quality of life indicators.

Last week, representatives of major research institutions and leading IT companies came to CERN for a data analytics workshop organized by CERN openlab.

The first FitSM certification course in lightweight service management for federated IT infrastructures was held last month at the EGI Technical Forum in Madrid, Spain. Sy Hollsinger, senior strategy and policy officer for EGI.eu, reports on the course.

Research at CERN featured prominently in discussion at ISC Big Data ’13, which was held last week in Heidelberg, Germany. The event focused on the future of handling big data, as well as big data as a crossroads where high-performance computing and enterprise meet.

Following last week's EGI Community Forum 2013, read our pick of the highlights from the GridCast blog.

Last week, the 10^th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting took place, hosted by the European Commission Services with the support of the e-ScienceTalk project. Find out what delegates at the event had to say on the subject of measuring project impact and success.

Plus: Read the highlights of discussions concerning the development of the computational infrastructure of 21st century science.

Wolfgang Gentzsch, co-founder of the UberCloud HPC experiment and advisor to EUDAT, speaks exclusively to iSGTW about the challenges facing cloud computing in the run up to this month’s Cloudscape V conference in Brussels, Belgium. 

New developments and services for research and scientific communities are high on the agenda at Cloudscape V, 27-28 February 2013 at the International Auditorium in Brussels.