Towards a European Collaborative Data Infrastructure

The EUDAT project is a pan-European data initiative that started in October 2011. The project brings together a unique consortium of 25 partners - including research communities, national data and high performance computing (HPC) centres, technology providers, and funding agencies - from 13 countries. EUDAT aims to build a sustainable cross-disciplinary and cross-national data infrastructure that provides a set of shared services for accessing and preserving research data. The design and deployment of these services is being coordinated by multi-disciplinary task forces comprising representatives from research communities and data centres. This short paper presents the achievements of the project during its first year and describes the services that have been chosen to meet the requirements of the initial research communities involved in the project. CSC — IT Center for Science Ltd., FI-02101 Espoo, Finland, SARA, Science Park 140, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands.