Introduction
The Consortium composed of the following four partners:
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- Trans European Research and Education Networking Association, hereafter called TERENA, the leading partner;
- Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche - Association of European Research Libraries, hereafter called LIBER;
- Universiteit van Amsterdam hereafter called UvA;
- University and National Library of Debrecen hereafter called DEENK
has been awarded by the European Commission the grant to do a study on “AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) platforms and services for scientific data/information resources”.
Aim of the Study
Supporting and promoting scientific research and innovation as well as opening up access to scientific information are key priorities for the European Commission and for the Member States.
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- Describe the rationale for the integrated SDI and its added value to access, store and preserve heterogeneous data;
- Provide recommendations for adapting the existing, widely used platforms and services to be fully compliant with the requirements posed by the use of data/information resources (papers, catalogues, raw data, images, etc).
- Provide recommendations on how the European regulations could support such an integrated SDI;
- Provide technical recommendations for developers to favour specific technologies to ensure future inter-operability;
- Address the (organizational, legal and technical) challenges to provide pan-Europe AAA/AAI for SDI/e-Infrastructure.
Particular importance will be given to the The following objectives and factors will be addressed in the study:(i) consolidation
- consolidation and federation of existing e-Infrastructures to comply with the requirements posed by the use of data and information resources - this will be led by an analysis of use-cases;
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- integration with e-Government AAA initiatives ;
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- ease of access to data and information resources not only for the scientific community but for the wider public as well;
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- the use of e-Infrastructure as a cost-efficient platform for large-scale technological experimentation;
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- the role of new technologies and standards under development in relevant bodies such as IETF, OGF, OASIS, ISO/ITU-T, IEEE and how these can be used to provide the SDI;
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- the role of industry technologies such as those used by social networks (i.e. Facebook), Google and Microsoft in creating e-Infrastructure.
A pan-European trustworthy infrastructure for access to research data will stimulate the exchange of information and will give a boost to students’ and researchers’ mobility. It will support libraries and data centres in their core business: making sure that data can be easily made available not only now but also in the near or far future.
Role of libraries in providing access to scientific information and data
Libraries provide free access to large amounts of information resources, but there are also large amounts of copyright material licensed from rights holders; medical research needs to share images or data in a way to preserve privacy; physicists share not only data but also resources (such as machines, storage and so on). In all cases, mechanisms and infrastructures to manage access are needed, for example to avoid misinterpretation or misuse of data, to identify the person requesting access, to identify his/her privileges and to log usage of data, to respect privacy regulations, to deal with ethical issues, to guarantee data quality and integrity etc.
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Timetable, Deliverables, and Meetings
The study will be done in period from January 2012 till August 2012 with the following deliverables and timetable.
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Final workshop will be organised in July 2012 to discuss results if the study and findings to be presented in the Final study report. During this meeting a draft of the final study report will be presented. The workshop will be organised at the Commission’s premises in Brussels.
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Consortium
TERENA (http://www.terena.org) has extensive and consolidated experience in leading pan-European initiatives and large-scale studies. TERENA operates under a model in which experts with the appropriate competence and experience from the national academic networks and the research community collaborate in the well-established initiatives operating under the TERENA’s umbrella, such as the Research and Education FEDerationS (REFEDS) initiative, the task-force on European Middleware Coordination and Collaboration (TF-EMC2) and the task-force on Mobility and Network Middleware (TF-MNM). Through the leadership of these groups (who have committed to participating in this study) and through TERENA’s participation in the GÉANT project, TERENA can provide extraordinary resources and knowledge for the task at hand: assessing the AAA-infrastructures operated by (and for) the European R&E community, define the requirements of this community for the next decade and propose recommendations to build the Scientific Data infrastructure (SDI).
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