EUDAT 2nd Conference in Rome

EUDAT 2nd Conference was held last week in Rome. There were more than 200 participants present which shows that the topic of Research Data is highly relevant for many communities. The packed programme of the conference consisted of workshops, training sessions, keynotes and parallel sessions.

In its quest to develop sustainable European Collaborative Data Infrastructure EUDAT aims to work in close contact with the user communities. That is of course a natural but often in practice overlooked approach to succeed in building something that will actually be used by the community. In my opinion EUDAT is doing good job in this respect, as also exemplified by the parallel sessions on EUDAT services in the conference. In these sessions both available and new services were presented and as joined one of these sessions (on the B2Share a.k.a. Simple Store service) there was genuine interaction between the representatives of the user communities and the developers.

The keynotes speakers included high-profile names from research but also leaders from international eScience projects. iSGTW online newsletter gives good overview on these and many other presentations of the conference. From the keynotes, however, I want to highlight a presentation (slides in pdf format) given by William (Bill) Michener, Professor and Director of e-Science Initiatives for University Libraries, University of New Mexico & DataONE Principal Investigator. DataONE is a cyberinfrastructure - as they say in the U.S. - for Earth observational data which has put in place an impressive set of data services for the earth science researchers.

In summary the EUDAT project seems to be going strong and has shown its ability to roll out concrete services for research data management. Together with its links to international activities (including Research Data Alliance RDA) and the user community involvement the initiative stands in excellent position to build a sustainable data infrastructure in Europe.