EUDAT CDI

EUDAT CDI
Name	EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure
Acronym	EUDAT CDI
Established	2011
Region	Europe
Type	Research data infrastructure

EUDAT CDI EUDAT CDI is a pan-European collaborative data infrastructure created to provide shared services and best practices for long-term research data management across multiple scientific communities. It was initiated to interconnect national data centers, research infrastructures, and university repositories to support reproducible research and cross-disciplinary data reuse. The initiative built on partnerships among prominent European institutions and projects to deliver persistent identifiers, replication, metadata services, and data discovery capabilities.

Overview

EUDAT CDI emerged from alliances involving major research organizations such as CERN, EMBL-EBI, CNRS, Max Planck Society, and SURFsara to address scalable data stewardship needs. Policy discussions drew on frameworks developed by European Commission programs and collaborations with projects like PRACE, OpenAIRE, EOSCpilot, RDA, and DataCite. The infrastructure positioned itself alongside national efforts including Jisc, DFG, IN2P3, and SND to harmonize practices for data curation and access. Stakeholders ranged from domain-focused infrastructures such as CLARIN, COPERNICUS, EPOS, and ELIXIR to multidisciplinary consortia like GÉANT and EIROforum.

Architecture and Components

The CDI architecture combined distributed storage, metadata indexing, identity federations, and persistent identifier systems. Core components were developed with input from software partners including SICS, KIT, BSC, and CINES. Storage nodes at participating centers used technologies compatible with systems deployed at PRACE supercomputing centers, FZJ sites, and university data centers affiliated with SURFnet. Metadata services interfaced with registries and catalogues influenced by Eurostat and COPERNICUS data models. Authentication and authorization integrated federations like eduGAIN and services familiar to Shibboleth and ORCID communities. Persistent identifiers were coordinated with DataCite, Handle System, and related infrastructures used by Dryad and Figshare.

Services and Capabilities

EUDAT CDI offered a suite of shared services for data lifecycle management: replication and safe data storage, PID assignment, metadata cataloguing, data discovery, and large-scale transfer. These services were analogous to offerings from repositories such as Zenodo and PANGAEA and supplemented community platforms like ICPSR and GBIF. Data replication drew on techniques used in WLCG operations and mirrored practices from national grids such as NorduGrid. Metadata and discovery services were compatible with standards advocated by DARIAH and ARIADNE to support humanities and earth science datasets. The CDI facilitated high-throughput transfers interoperable with tools used by XSEDE and PRACE researchers, and integrated with citation workflows championed by Crossref and DataCite.

Governance and Collaboration

Governance was a federated model combining contributions from research organizations, national infrastructures, and funding bodies including Horizon 2020 and national research agencies like EPSRC, ANR, and Austrian Science Fund. Decision-making incorporated advisory input from stakeholder groups resembling the roles of ESFRI and Science Europe. Operational collaboration relied on consortia agreements similar to governance seen in CERN collaborations and cooperative frameworks used by ELIXIR and EMBL. Community engagement included working groups associated with RDA and interoperability initiatives linked to ISO standards committees and W3C recommendations.

Adoption and Use Cases

EUDAT CDI was adopted across domains including climatology, genomics, social sciences, and humanities by projects such as CMIP, EuroClim, ENCODE, Human Cell Atlas, and studies coordinated with Eurostat datasets. Earth observation use cases aligned with Copernicus services; biodiversity research interfaced with GBIF; archaeological and cultural heritage projects coordinated with Europeana and DARIAH; and high-energy physics collaborations connected via CERN data workflows. Social science repositories and longitudinal studies used CDI services in manners similar to ICPSR and UK Data Service practices. University consortia like UNIL, KU Leuven, and University of Helsinki integrated CDI features into institutional repositories.

Security, Privacy, and Compliance

Security and privacy considerations were managed through alignment with European data protection laws and best practices promoted by organizations such as European Data Protection Board and directives influenced by GDPR. Access control and authentication practices echoed federated identity approaches used by eduGAIN and implemented with technologies like Shibboleth and OAuth profiles. Compliance workflows considered ethical review frameworks akin to those used by Horizon 2020 projects and institutional review boards at universities including ETH Zurich and University of Amsterdam. Risk management and audit trails were designed drawing on operational models from CERN and national grid security teams at FZ Jülich.

Category:Research data infrastructure