Support to existing research infrastructures (GÉANT) is another priority in this call. The proposal must be collectively submitted by legal entities operating the NRENs (National Research and Education Networks). Legal
entities created by the NRENs to contribute to the deployment of onnectivity and services on a pan-European scale (e.g. DANTE, TERENA, NORDUnet) can also participate.

ICT based e-Infrastructures, and among those scientific data infrastructure, is the second area in this call.
The workprogramme specifies for these activities the following:
Supports is available for the deployment of a broad European multidisciplinary scientific data infrastructure able to be easily federated with other knowledge infrastructures in other parts of the world, building upon the achievements of network and grid infrastructures and opening its benefits to other potential research areas such as e-health, e-learning and others.
This activity addresses the rapidly increasing use of digital content in research and in the generation and dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge. The increasing availability of primary sources of
data in digital form (e.g. experimental raw data, social sciences data) has the potential to shift the balance away from research based on secondary sources (such as publications), thus positioning data as the central element in the scientific process. This activity should provide an integrated set of services exploiting the middleware and grid capabilities to federate data in an eco-system of digital resources. These services should enhance the ability of researchers to extract further meaning from masses of data stored in institutional, national or community repositories, by supporting the deployment of standardised mechanisms to store, archive, authenticate, access, transfer, preserve, curate, certify and interpret scientific data. Furthermore, the deployed scientific data infrastructure will require adaptation in cultures and new approaches and competences, given the intrinsic relation between data and associated software to read, interpret and process it.

Expected impact: This topic will increase the scale of federation and interoperation of digital repositories, consolidating synergies with the underlying e-Infrastructures. The widespread implementation of strategies for curation and preservation will lead to more robust data infrastructures profiting from the interconnection and access to distributed and high-end computing and storage resources. The adoption of common management strategies will reduce costs, increase the users' base and bridge across multidisciplinary communities, enabling crossfertilisation of scientific results and favouring innovation.

20 million euro are in total available for the call with the identifier FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2008-2.

Source: Download the call and the workprogramme from CORDIS