eduGAIN has proved its worth for a range of educational collaboration projects. It is also involved in supporting distributed research infrastructure projects for the biological sciences and for the arts and humanities.
Virtual Campus Hub (VCH) was a pilot project that connected four technical universities in Denmark, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden, so that their students and teachers could collaborate internationally, using videoconferencing, shared documents and web lectures.
"The value of eduGAIN for institutions is very clear if they want to work together internationally. Next to the technical support it offers, eduGAIN also offers a legal framework that helps you if you want to set up an international collaboration. Without eduGAIN, it would have been much more difficult for those four institutions to work together online."
Sabita Behari (SURFnet): Virtual Campus Hub project
See the full interview with Sabita in the GÉANT CONNECT magazine and on the SURFnet website. More about Virtual Campus Hub.
ELIXIR(European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information) is a distributed research infrastructure, where leading organisations from 17 European countries and EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) joined forces to tackle the challenge of data volumes created by modern life science research.
"The created data has to be annotated and structured according to international standards, and shared collectively with other countries. This is where GÉANT and national research and education network providers play a key infrastructure role. eduGAIN is a prospective component to providing single-sign-on for the biomedical-community services that need login. In some cases data needs to be protected, at least for a certain time, for ethical, legal, societal or business reasons. We have decided to rely on the existing European network of trust, eduGAIN, to first electronically identify researchers who seek and access-controlled dataset for their work. The eduGAIN and GEANT enabling user actions have been instrumental in getting forward together to work on life sciences data infrastructure challenges."
Tommi Nyronen (CSC Finland) ELIXIR
DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the humanities and arts. The core strategy of DARIAH is to bring together national, regional, and local endeavours to form a cooperative infrastructure where complementarities and new challenges are clearly identified and acted upon.
Peter Gietz: DARIAH
