Trip Report NEERI 2010

• Conference full title: Networking Event for the European Research Infrastructures (NEERI)
• Date/Place: 21 October 2010, Vienna

Introduction

NEERI2010 is the second Networking Event of its kind, providing a follow-up to NEERI2009 held in Helsinki. The goal of NEERI2010 is to exchange ideas on a number of topics relevant for research infrastructures and to clear common ground on the further development and application of these topics. NEERI focuses on what we share and what we can learn from each other. Examples of such commonalities are architectural issues, communication with users and integration of services and tools.

Keynote

Starting with a very interesting Keynote from Laurent Romary, clarifying the

    Report of the High-Level Expert Group on Scientific Data, October 2010. 
    Riding the Wave: how Europe can gain from the raising tide of scientific data
    File:Laurent Romary Plenary key speaker-HLG-SDI Report ppt - NEERI.pptx

and its impact on the humanities and social sciences.

The Expert group considers of outmost importance for the research infrastructures to establish collaboration in all important organizational and technical aspects, towards a vision of a "scientific e-Infrastructure that supports seamless access, use, re-use and trust of data. In a sense, the physical and technical infrastructure becomes invisible and the data themselves become the infrastructure – a valuable asset, on which science, technology, the economy and society can advance."

That would enable as well collaboration among researchers, increase the productivity of research, allow for sharing, use and re-use of data, however by preserving data authenticity, integrity and trustworthiness. It is both a challenge and an opportunity to establish proper data management and data integration infrastructures - having in mind the data scale, complexity and diversity and their accelerating growth. Beneficiaries of such established, living and collaborating research infrastructures would be not only the researchers, but also general public, funders and policy makers, as well as enterprises and industry. Therefore, EU and national agencies must define clear strategies and ensure sufficient resources for their implementation.

The Expert group had developed an initial wish list (adapted from the PARADE White Paper) containing minimum requirements that such an infrastructure has to fulfill: long term preservation (bitstream, format migration), persistent identification, standardization of metadata - format- and semantic level interoperability, proper implementation of access rights, enabling large groups of researchers to operate on the data, regular quality assesment and metrics on data usage, availability and reliability to feed back into further improvement of the infrastructure.

Additionally, a list of possible actions to overcome impediments such as financing, trustworthiness, data expertise, usage and complexity of the infrastructures, lack of published data, unwillingness to cooperate accross disciplines.

General mssage - close collaboration between researchers, funders, implementors of research infrastructures and industry has to be established from the very beggining - only then challenges could be addressed successfully.