BBMRI-ERIC aims to facilitate the joint establishment and operation of research infrastructures of European interest that will provide access to the collections of partner biobanks and biomolecular resources, their expertise and services on a non-economic basis. The mission of BBMRI-ERIC CS-IT project, which started in January 2016, is to deliver expertise, services, and tools relevant to the pursuance of the tasks and activities of BBMRI-ERIC. The project work is divided into 8 work packages (WPs), with WP8 responsible for providing specifications and tools for facilitating collaboration on Data Harmonization, mainly required by WP1 (Directory service) and WP2 (Sample locator). The aim of this document is to define initial requirement specifications for common terminologies and reporting data sets to support CS-IT architecture plan (Alexandre et al. 2016), based on input from European biobanks and national nodes. The input was provided mainly through two separate questionnaires, one directed to European Biobanks listed in the BBMRI-ERIC Directory, the other directed to National Node Coordinators. In addition, follow-up questionnaires were sent to selected biobanks from each BBMRI-ERIC member country. The results of these questionnaires were considered together with information from additional sources, such as Sample Finder webinars1, BBMRI-ERIC Use Cases document (Holub et al. 2016) and State of the Art Review of Harmonization Tools (Mate et al. 2016) in order to provide the initial requirement specifications.