This project brought together all five ESFRI research infrastructure initiatives in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) represented each by some centers:

• CLARIN – Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure
• DARIAH – Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities
• CESSDA – Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives
• ESS – European Social Survey
• SHARE – Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe

The goal was to determine areas of possible synergies in the infrastructure development and to work on a few concrete joint activities.

The rationale

The rationale behind this idea was that double developments should be prevented, initiatives should mutually benefit from the advanced work of the others and with the aim to establish joint integrated domains where this makes sense for the SSH users.

Joint activities were undertaken along the following lines: understanding the different architectural solutions, assessing and improving data and metadata quality, setting up a tools and services forum, improving the quality of survey data, locatping and improving data preservation and curation services, developping a joint shared data access and enrichment framework (AAI, PIDs, joint Metadata, Workflow implementations, joint annotation framework), jointly working on legal and ethical aspects, carrying out much training and education work, working on disseminating the results.

The project duration was 36 months, starting on 1 January 2012 and ending on 31 December 2014.

Disclaimer: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement n° 283646.