January brings with it lots of new activities from EUDAT including the open Call for Collaboration Projects offering free resources and expertise to pilot collaboration projects as part of its Collaborative Data Infrastructure. Research communities, projects and individual researchers are invited to make use of its data services and should apply before 26th February 2014.

Part of the data services referred to in this call are B2SHARE a web-based service for storing and sharing small research data sets, and B2FIND a simple and user-friendly portal to find research data collections stored in EUDAT data centres and other repositories. B2FIND harvests metadata from diverse sources, maps it, and makes it publically available through its cross-disciplinary catalogue. These two services are now fully deployed. Have a look by yourself! More details on EUDAT’s current and future service development and deployment are included in the service Roadmap.

The EUDAT Working groups set up in September 2013 and composed of international experts working together with EUDAT representatives, continue to investigate and discuss potential service solutions in the field of Dynamic Data, Workflows and Semantic Annotation together with an expert group focusing on Data Access and Re-Use Policies (DARUP). As a direct result of EUDAT’s Semantic Annotation Working group, the European Ontology Network (EUON) is being set up to respond to communities’ need to share and coordinate expertise and experience in the European ontology community. EUON will use the B2SHARE service to store and share data.

A fundamental concept and principle behind all of EUDAT’s activities is that Trust is key for data infrastructures and has recently published a position statement on the Value of Data and Trust. It outlines how trusted relations between various actors must be established and context-sensitive trust measures need to be put in place as they are indispensable for the global market of knowledge exchange. One such measure is data management. EUDAT aim to provide a solution that will be affordable, trustworthy, robust, persistent, open and easy to use as outlined in its current position note on open access, open data and data management planning.

Where can you meet us?

There will be many opportunities to engage with EUDAT during the coming months, through the Call for Collaboration Projects or via more informal interactions at different events. View a complete list of events at Meet Us @ and EUDAT Training plans.

For all this and more check out the new look EUDAT web site at www.eudat.eu