Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
24.4.1 Deployment and Adoption
The need for an infrastructure on an international scale is evident. To ensure that
such an infrastructure will be supported by all stakeholders across Europe and
beyond, a well-defined strategy is needed to stimulate its adoption. This strategy
can be considered from two perspectives: a bottom-up view, representing the view
of the end-users (researchers, publishers, data managers, etc) and a top-down view
which represents the perspective of the initiators of the infrastructure.
The bottom-up perspective currently gives a view on many initiatives taken on
sharing data amongst researchers within their research domain as mentioned in the
previous section (e.g. GEANT, EGEE). These national or domain-specific solutions
(islands of capabilities) are mostly developed to enable interoperability between
different science stakeholders. The clustering of information resources is an ongoing
process already and will eventually lead to larger networks that allow stakeholders
to share information. However cross-domain cooperation will still be limited due to
incompatibility of these domain-specific infrastructures. The solutions often do not
share a standardised and certified approach, which limits overall sustainability of the
infrastructure. While respecting the existing solutions, it is a challenge to achieve a
global infrastructure that not only allows researchers to share data, but also to keep
the information trusted, reliable and secure.
To achieve better sustainability and interoperability, the top-down approach can
help by promoting the foundation of guidelines and recommendations for sus-
tainable data archives. The Repository Audit and Certification work aims in this
direction. Moreover, standards should be promoted which are compliant with a
trans-national infrastructure, but also are easy to adopt in the already existing net-
worked domains. The EU as well as other international bodies can play an important
role in this process.
It is worth noting that Audit and Certification can apply not just to the data hold-
ings but also to most of the other infrastructural components which are mentioned
in the next section. These components depend upon their holdings of information,
for example Representation Information, which must itself be preserved over the
long term. Thus those infrastructure components should themselves be audited and
certified if the infrastructure itself - or at least the information on which it depends -
is to be usable over the long term.
The benefit of this top-down approach not only ends with better interoperable
and sustainable networks, it also draws a clear scenery of the European science
landscape, allowing new stakeholders to build a business model on top of the infras-
tructure. Researchers are assured that their data is compatible and safe because of
certification and legislation while new businesses can offer new services on top of
this secure layer of the infrastructure.
A good example is the OAIS Reference Model (ISO 14721:2003), which has
become a worldwide adopted standard for building a sustainable digital archive.
Today, various vendors developed their own archiving solutions and bring them to
the market.
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