News

On 6 March 2024, MLCommons (an Artificial Intelligence engineering consortium) announced the release of Croissant, a metadata format to help standardise machine learning (ML) datasets. The aim of Croissant is to make datasets easily discoverable and usable across tools and platforms. This is highly relevant in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) tasks on FAIR data sustainability and important for Linked Data in general.

DANS wishes you a merry christmas and happy newyear

In the dynamic landscape of research data, 2023 proved to be a year of remarkable developments for DANS. From the launch of Data Stations to participation in international projects, here’s an overview of the highlights.

From 11 December 2023, it will no longer be possible to deposit data in EASY. Researchers, groups of researchers and data professionals can archive and publish their data in one of the four domain-specific DANS Data Stations. There is a Data Station for Archaeology, Social Sciences and Humanities, Physical & Technical Sciences, and a Data Station for Life Sciences.

On Monday 20 February, NWO brought the news that nine projects will receive 140 million euros to set up or improve large-scale research infrastructure. The Dutch research field jointly set its priorities for investment in large-scale research infrastructure for the next ten years in the so called National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Infrastructure. DANS is involved in two of these projects: SSHOC-NL and LTER-LIFE.

The formation of three science-wide Digital Competence Centres has started. As a first step, the Governing Board of NWO has agreed to allocate a total of 4.5 million euros for the appointment of network coordinators. They will strengthen data intensive research together with experts and infrastructures within their research domain.

To reach a common picture on how FAIR and metadata are connected and what guidance can be given to properly provide metadata in order to claim your (spatial) data are FAIR, the Netherlands Geodetic Commission (NCG) organises a workshop for scientists and data stewards working with geospatial data. The workshop shall take place in the afternoon of the 7th of July at the WUR Campus (Omnia building) in Wageningen.

In just under four years, the number of deposited datasets has more than doubled to 200,000. In part, this has been made possible by the ‘machine-to-machine’ depositing of data, without human intervention. We have made strict agreements with the various institutions for this automatic depositing of data.

E-RIHS is working hard to realise its ambition to develop a European infrastructure that provides access to international laboratory facilities, research data and a network of knowledge and expertise. Within the Dutch E-RIHS infrastructure, DANS contributes to the FAIRification of the Dutch data landscape using a needs analysis.