David has initiated and led a number of projects, implementing the strategic plan of the APA:

Common Aims

The APA members’ common aim is to develop a shared vision and framework for a sustainable organisational infrastructure for permanent access to digitally encoded information.

APA members include large international (CERN, ESA) and national (STFC, Helmholtz, CSC etc.) science organisations, national libraries (BL, KB, DNB), funders, publishers (STM) and national coalitions (DPC, nestor, NCDD); APA is now extending its membership beyond Europe.

The projects described here, all part funded under FP7, are some of the ways we are advancing these aims.

The advantages (from the Riding the Wave report http://tinyurl.com/6hrfwtw) are that “researchers in different domains can collaborate on the same data set, finding new insights. They can share a data set easily across the globe, but also protect its integrity and ownership. For society as a whole, this is beneficial. It empowers amateurs to contribute more easily to the scientific process, politicians to govern more effectively with solid evidence, and the European and global economy to expand.”

Integrated view of digital preservation

APARSEN aims to look across the excellent work in digital preservation which is carried out in Europe and to try to bring it together under a Common Vision. This de-fragmentation of approaches will avoid waste of effort and more rapid development of effective solutions.

In addition APARSEN will help the APA evolve into an internationally recognised Virtual Centre of Excellence bringing together an even wider set of organisations.

For more information see www.aparsen.eu

Value from Sharing

A data deluge emerges from publicly-funded research facilities. To realise its value we need to shape the data sharing, re-use and preservation layers of the emerging e-Infrastructure

ODE is identifying emerging best practices in sharing, re-using, preserving and citing data, the drivers for these changes and barriers impeding progress.

For more information see www.ode-project.eu

Common Infrastructure

The aim of the SCIDIP-ES initiative is to deliver generic services for data preservation as part of the data infrastructure for e-science, building on the experience of CASPAR and PARSE.Insight (earlier APA related projects) and the ESA Earth Observation Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) programme to help the setting-up of a European Framework for the long term preservation of Earth Science (ES) data through the definition of common preservation policies and the deployment of the generic infrastructure services in the Earth Science domain.

Re-use of Earth Science data is clearly valuable for example for environmental, climate change and disaster monitoring applications. Furthermore Earth Science will provide a ‘critical mass’ of users for the sustaining of the infrastructure.

The APA will enable the services to be introduced beyond the Earth Science domain and will help to maintain the services by acting as Guarantor/Exchange node of the services’ e-infrastructure components.

For more information see www.scidip-es.eu

Linked Data

The PRELIDA project targets the particular stakeholders of the Linked Data community, including data providers, service providers, technology providers and end user communities. These stakeholders have not been traditionally targeted by the Digital Preservation community, and are typically not aware of the digital preservation solutions already available. So an important task of PRELIDA is to raise awareness of existing preservation solutions and to facilitate their uptake.

At the same time, the Linked Data cloud has specific characteristics in terms of structuring, interlinkage, dynamicity and distribution, that pose new challenges to the preservation community. PRELIDA will organise in-depth discussions among the two communities to identify which of these characteristics require novel solutions, and to develop road maps for addressing the new challenges.

– See more at: http://www.prelida.eu