From Open Data to Data-intensive Science through CERIF

Abstract

OGD (Open Government Data) is provided from government departments for transparency and to stimulate a market in ICT services for industry and citizens. Research datasets from publicly funded research commonly are associated with the open scholarly publications movement. However, the former world commonly is derived from the latter with generalisation and summarisation. There is advantage in a user of OGD being able to ‘drill down’ to the underlying research datasets. OGD encourages cross-domain research because the summarized data from different domains is more easily relatable. Bridging across the two worlds requires rich metadata; CERIF (Common European research Information Format) has proved itself to be ideally suited to this requirement. Utilising the research datasets is data-intensive science, a component of e-Research. Data-intensive science also requires access to an e-infrastructure. Virtualisation of this e-infrastructure optimizes this.