The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMentors joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium.

EUDAT is a project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development and it started in October 2011 with a duration of 36 months.

The EUDAT vision is to support a Collaborative Data Infrastructure which will allow researchers to share data within and between communities and enable them to carry out their research effectively. EUDAT aims to provide a solution that will be affordable, trustworthy, robust, persistent and easy to use.

Mission:

• Help fulfill the vision of a European Data e-infrastructure by providing a sustainable platform of technologies, tools and services driven by user needs;
• Engage users (including individual researchers along with representatives from universities, research labs, and libraries) in defining and shaping a platform for shared services that makes it possible for data-intensive research to span all the scientific disciplines;
• Produce the common low-level services that are required to provide the level of interoperation and trust of data that is necessary to support both widespread access to data, and the long-term preservation of data for use and re-use;
• Ensure that the data infrastructure is sufficiently robust to keep pace with the expected acceleration of the scale and complexity of scientific data being generated within the ERA and beyond.

The EUDAT consortium includes representatives from each stage of the process that delivers scientific knowledge to researchers, citizens, industry and also to society as a whole. The consortium comprises 26 European partners, including data centers and technology providers, along with research communities and funding agencies from 13 countries.

The “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” Conference at a glance.