As the calendar year comes to a close, EUDAT is embarking on its third year with an even stronger focus on communities, services (both existing and new), training and collaboration. As part of its continuous drive to extend its network on both the community and geographical levels, EUDAT welcomes three new Associated Partners on board: the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET), the Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology (DRIHM) and the Data Infrastructure for Chemical Safety (diXa).

Listening to the requirements of research communities and scientists is the foundation upon which EUDAT is built, and agile interaction has always been part of its core activity. EUDAT has adopted different ways to listen to communities and users, and to involve domain experts in defining its new building blocks and services.

To intensify this interaction in specific areas of interest, EUDAT has adopted the concept of Working Groups from the DataONE project as a method to bring domain experts, EUDAT community representatives and EUDAT technologists together to discuss identified fields of interest, where the exact setup of a concrete service is not yet fully clear. Currently four service areas are being taken forward – Semantics, Dynamic Data, Workflows and Data Access and Reuse Policies. These four areas were the focus of dedicated working group meetings in September 2013 and a specific track at EUDAT’s 2nd Conference in October 2013. Detailed reports on the discussions and conclusions are available on the working groups section of EUDAT website.

During the last quarter of 2013, EUDAT invited the user community to provide input to the next set of services to be designed. We are grateful to the 123 people from over 17 countries who completed the survey, providing interesting and useful insight into community needs and requirements – see the preliminary results on the website.

EUDAT next appointments: where can you meet us next year?

In January you’ll find us with CLARIN at 7th Conference on Global WordNet, February takes us to Edinburgh with PRACE for the Data Staging and Data Movement Training, while in March we’ll be running training in Dublin at the RDA Third Plenary Meeting, then we go south to Greece in April for ICRI2014 and in May we’ll be organising a workshop at the EGI Community Forum 2014 in Helsinki.