A data infrastructure is a digital infrastructure promoting
data sharing
Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...
and consumption.
Similarly to other
infrastructures, it is a structure needed for the operation of a society as well as the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function, the data economy in this case.
Background
There is an intense discussion at international level on
e-infrastructures and data infrastructure serving scientific work.
The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) presented the first European roadmap for large-scale Research Infrastructures.
These are modeled as layered hardware and software systems which support sharing of a wide spectrum of resources, spanning from networks, storage, computing resources, and system-level middleware software, to structured information within collections, archives, and databases. The
e-Infrastructure Reflection Group
e-IRG (e-Infrastructure Reflection Group)
The e-IRG is a European inter-governmental advisory group dealing with policies on electronic infrastructures (E-infrastructure, e-Infrastructures) for research, i.e. research networks, computing, soft ...
(e-IRG) has proposed a similar vision.
In particular, it envisions e-Infrastructures where the principles of global collaboration and
shared resources are intended to encompass the sharing needs of all research activities.
In the framework of the
Joint Information Systems Committee
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector.
History
T ...
(JISC) e-infrastructure programme, e-Infrastructures are defined in terms of integration of networks, grids,
data centers and
collaborative environments, and are intended to include supporting operation centers, service registries, credential delegation services,
certificate authorities
In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This ...
, training and
help desk
A help desk is a department or person that provides assistance and information usually for electronic or computer problems. In the mid-1990s, research by Iain Middleton of Robert Gordon University studied the value of an organization's help desk ...
services. The Cyberinfrastructure programme launched by the US
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
(NSF) plans to develop new research environments in which advanced computational, collaborative, data acquisition and management services are made available to researchers connected through high-performance networks.
More recently, the vision for “global research data infrastructures” has been drawn by identifying a number of recommendations for developers of future research infrastructures.
This vision document highlighted the open issues affecting data infrastructures development – both technical and organizational – and identified future research directions.
Besides these initiatives targeting “generic” infrastructures there are others oriented to specific domains, e.g. the
European commission
The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
promotes the
INSPIRE
The following is a thematic list of European Union directives:
For a date based list, see the :European Union directives by number
Numbering
From 1 January 1992 to 31 December 2014, numbers assigned by the General Secretariat of the Council ...
initiative for an e-Infrastructure oriented to the sharing of content and service resources of European countries in the ambit of
geospatial datasets.
Related Projects
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D4Science
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OpenAIRE[OpenAIRE Website http://www.openaire.eu/]
EUDATGRDI2020EPOS
See also
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Hybrid Data Infrastructure
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Information Infrastructure
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Research Infrastructure
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Spatial Data Infrastructure
References
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What is data infrastructure?
Information systems
IT infrastructure
Data