Big Data in Science and the EUDAT Project

In recent years significant investment has been made by the European Commission and European member states to create a pan-European e-Infrastructure supporting multiple research communities. In the data area, efforts are being driven by the EUDAT project, a pan-European data initiative that started in October 2011. The project brings together a unique consortium of 26 partners - including research communities, national data and high performance computing (HPC) centers, technology providers, and funding agencies - from 13 countries. EUDAT aims to build a sustainable cross-disciplinary and cross-national data infrastructure that provides a set of shared services for accessing and preserving research data, for large scientific communities, but also for small and medium size communities and even individual or "citizen" scientists. The B2Share service is one example of a service targeting this audience.