[Gbif-europe] ICEDIG funded

Wouter Addink wouter.addink at naturalis.nl
Thu Aug 24 12:25:56 CEST 2017


Dear node collegues,

I forward to you a message from Hannu Saarenmaa with excellent news re.
ICEDIG. The proposal scored very high, 14.5 out of 15 points.

Kind regards,
Wouter Addink

we are happy to inform you that the project proposal ICEDIG was favourably
evaluated by the European Commission, and we have entered the grant
signature process. ICEDIG stands for ‘Innovation and Consolidation for
large-scale Digitisation of natural heritage’, and was a response to the
H2020 call for Design Studies for new research infrastructures.

This will facilitate the DiSSCo preparatory phase by providing additional
resources for addressing the technical and organisational challenges, which
need to be solved before construction of this new research infrastructure
commences. ICEDIG will be closely connected with DiSSCo coordination
activities, and contribute its results and designs to the ESFRI process.
The public abstract of the project is included below.

The ICEDIG project has 12 partners. Its 9 work packages have been divided
into a technical stream and a consolidation stream. The technical stream is
being led by Wouter Addink of NATURALIS and of the DiSSCo Coordination
Team. It consists of work packages for Imaging (lead Picturae), Data
Capture (lead Meise), Citizen Science (lead U Tartu), and Data
Infrastructures (lead U Cardiff). The consolidation stream is being led by
Dimitris Koureas of NHM (and again of the DiSSCo Coordination Team). It
consists of work packages for Science Needs (lead NATURALIS), Positioning &
Legal Aspects (lead NHM), and Design Alternatives & Economies (lead U
Cardiff). The supporting work packages are Dissemination & Networking (lead
CETAF) and Management (led by the project coordinator Luomus of U
Helsinki). Other partners include CINES, Kew, MNHN, and Plazi/CERN.

The project is expected to start in January 2018 and run for 27 months
until March 2020. The European Commission contributes with 3 million euro.

The project will organise wide communication activities across the
scientific collections community and external stakeholders. An opening
conference is being scheduled for February. We look forward to working with
all of you and hope to make a useful contribution to DiSSCo.

More information to follow, once the project has been organised.

Yours sincerely, Leif Schulman and Hannu Saarenmaa, University of Helsinki

--

Public Abstract: Modern science requires digital access to data. European
collections account for 55% of the natural sciences collections globally,
holding more than 1 billion objects, which represent 80% of the world’s
bio- and geo-diversity. Only around 10% of these have been digitally
catalogued and 1-2% imaged, rendering their information underused. The
sheer scale and complexity of digitising and providing access to this
information requires technological, socio-cultural, and organisational
capacity enhancements across the continent. This challenge is being tackled
by the new ESFRI initiative Distributed System of Scientific Collections
(DiSSCo). DiSSCo will unify access to collection data in a harmonised and
integrated manner across Europe. It will enable critical new insights from
integrated digital data to address some of the world's greatest challenges,
such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. However, new
research and technological innovation will be required to solve the
challenges of efficiently digitising and seamlessly accessing the
collections. Building on previous project outputs, community and industrial
expertise, the ICEDIG project will design all the technical, financial,
policy and governance aspects for developing and operating DiSSCo. A
consolidation stream will develop a shared governance model to support all
aspects of service unification such as implementation of the open access
principles, incentive schemes, planning and prioritisation, capacity
development, etc. A technology stream will focus on the innovations that
will be required to digitise a significant part of major collections in a
foreseeable time, at acceptable cost, and to manage petabyte-size data. The
work will be carried out in wide consultation with the larger community.
The outputs will be prototypes, blueprints, novel workflows, new industry
partnerships, and citizen involvement models, paving the way for the
successful construction of the DiSSCo research infrastructure.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.biodiversity.be/pipermail/gbif-europe/attachments/20170824/8228da78/attachment.html>


More information about the Gbif-europe mailing list