After formal approval of the Dutch node in ELIXIR (ELIXIR-NL) at the board meeting in Helsinki (7-8 april 2014) a joint meeting of the Heads of Nodes (HoN) and the technical coordinators (TC) of the various nodes and the hub took place in Sandham (Sweden, 6-8 May).
In alternating joint and separate meetings, the HoN and TC’s discussed many issues, ranging form early priorities for ELIXIR to ‘show off its added value’ to formal participation in the various INFRADEV and IR cluster grants in H2020. The common meeting was experienced as very productive, and will take place once a year.
In addition, the technical coordinators decided to form Task Forces for priority areas with multiple node TC’s in each TF so as to ensure good collaboration. To maximize the technical implementation process, the TC’s will meet 4 times a year in person and the HoN’s have approved that there should be budget for that activity structurally in ELIXIR.
Three clear priorities that emerged from the dicussions and that are related to the focus areas of ELIXIR-NL are:
- to get the technical infrastructure to “run” ELIXIR as an infrastructure on the road;
- the ‘functional interlinking’ of core data resources in as many ELIXIR nodes as possible;
- and training of data experts.
FAIRport, as an important multinode ELIXIR pilot led by ELIXIR-NL (with Sweden, UK and SIB co-proposing) was presented and the links to RDA and DONA were discussed. FAIRport was also presented in Dublin at the TERENA networking conference in Dublin where the ‘SURFS’ of this world have their meeting (opening keynote on datasetwardship challenges by Barend Mons).
ELIXIR-NL will soon take strong action in ‘datapublishing’ as a first step towards the ‘functional interlinking’ of data sources in ELIXIR.
