Highlights DANS Data Trail ‘How the EOSC Association stimulates community based Open Science’

Sarah Jones (EOSC Engagement manager at GÉANT and director of the EOSC Association 2021-2022) gave a brief overview about the EOSC Association and its working groups (Task Forces) and how they are working to connect and progress on specific topics. The aim is to seek connection with other initiatives and projects, translate expertise to the wider community while representing the interests of the various EOSC stakeholders.

Task Forces

There are currently thirteen EOSC Association Task Forces, four of which were discussed in more detail as DANS is involved in them. Some highlights from these presentations:

The Task Force ‘FAIR Metrics and Data Quality‘, presented by Marjan Grootveld, concerns implementing FAIR metrics in EOSC and looking at the more general aspects of data quality in the context of EOSC. A white paper on applications of FAIR principles and related metrics will be published soon. A promising quote from this paper was shared in advance: “The FAIR Principles represent a milestone in the evolution of scholarly data reuse, and likely should remain untouched, as written. Specialised domains should extend those Principles autonomously, in order to make them more relevant to their community.”

Finding a common definition and understanding of what ‘curation’ means, in EOSC context, was an important first step for the Long Term Data Preservation Task Force. Ingrid Dillo also spoke about the recommendations this Task Force will make for the creation of a European network of trusted FAIR digital repositories. This will take into account results such as the recently published ‘Working Paper‘.

According to Wim Hugo, the Task Force ‘Technical interoperability of data and services‘ forms the basis for most other types of interoperability (e.g. legal, organisational, semantic). The landscape analysis methodology used is published as a ‘living document’ open to feedback, input and additions from the community for better annotation of resources on the web. Hugo believes that the next step for interoperability is to actually look back at the legacy of existing outputs. Efforts are needed to retroactively make that legacy more interoperable, as it is essential to connect to current and future resources.

The Semantic Interoperability Task Force is working on metadata standards, metadata catalogues and practices. The biggest challenge for this group is the integration of the many different concepts, materials and guidelines that already exist in the landscape for different domains and technologies.

Missed the event?

If you were not able to join this DANS Data Trail, you can watch the recording of the webinar here:

You can also watch or download the presentation slides: