ESFRI projects
ESFRI,
the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures, is a strategic
instrument to develop the scientific integration of Europe and to strengthen its
international outreach. The mission of ESFRI is to support a coherent and strategy-led
approach to policy-making on research infrastructures in Europe, and to facilitate
multilateral initiatives leading to the better use and development of research infrastructures,
at EU and international level. This strategy aims at overcoming the limits due to
fragmentation of individual policies and provides Europe with the most up-to-date
Research Infrastructures, responding to the rapidly evolving Science frontiers,
advancing also the knowledge-based technologies and their extended use.
The publication of the first Roadmap for pan-European research infrastructures in
2006 was a key contributing factor, and several projects are now entering the realization
phase. The Forum is determined to sustain the momentum in the implementation of
the projects on the Roadmap, to expand the outreach to those scientific fields which
are still evolving their conceptual approach in this direction, and to increase
the involvement of all Countries by developing ad-hoc Regional policies. The second
update of the ESFRI Roadmap has been released on December 2008.
In the following a short description of ESFRI projects relevant to GRDI2020 is offered.
DARIAH - Digital Research
Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities
DARIAH’s mission is to facilitate long-term access
to, and use of all European arts and humanities data for the purposes of research.
DARIAH is the digital research infrastructure that will connect scholarly data archives
and repositories with cultural heritage for the arts and humanities across Europe,
making scattered resources accessible through one click.
DARIAH is working with communities of practice to:
- Explore and apply ICT-based methods and tools to enable new research questions to
be asked and old questions to be posed in new ways;
- Improve research opportunities and outcomes through linking distributed digital
source materials of many kinds;
- Exchange knowledge, expertise, methodologies and practices across domains and disciplines.
CESSDA - Council of European
Social Science Data Archives
CESSDA is an umbrella organisation for social
science data archives across Europe. Since the 1970s the members have worked together
to improve access to data for researchers and students. CESSDA research and development
projects and Expert Seminars enhance exchange of data and technologies among data
organisations.
CESSDA Research
Infrastructure (RI): "The present major task is ... to create pan-European
infrastructural systems that are needed by the social sciences ... to utilise the
vast amount of data and information that already exist or should be generated in
Europe. Today the social sciences ... are hampered by the fragmentation of the scientific
information space. Data, information and knowledge are scattered in space and divided
by language, cultural, economic, legal and institutional barriers" (ESFRI European
Roadmap for Research Infrastructures, Report 2006).
CLARIN - Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure
The CLARIN project is a large-scale pan-European
collaborative effort to create, coordinate and make language resources and technology
available and readily useable for the whole European Humanities (and Social Sciences)
community. CLARIN is committed to establish an integrated and interoperable research
infrastructure of language resources and its technology. It aims at lifting the
current fragmentation, offering a stable, persistent, accessible and extendable
infrastructure and therefore enabling eHumanities.
ICOS - Integrated Carbon Observation System
ICOS is a new European Research Infrastructure
for quantifying and understanding the greenhouse balance of the European continent
and of adjacent regions. ICOS aims to build a network of standardized, long-term,
high precision integrated monitoring of:
- atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of CO2, CH4, CO and radiocarbon-CO2 to
quantify the fossil fuel component;
- ecosystem fluxes of CO2, H2O, and heat together with ecosystem variables.
The ICOS infrastructure will integrate terrestrial and atmospheric observations
at various sites into a single, coherent, highly precise dataset. Target is a daily
mapping of sources and sinks at scales down to about 10 km, as a basis for understanding
the exchange processes between the atmosphere, the terrestrial surface and the ocean.