International FDO Testbed

The intention must be to test out all mechanisms in an international setting, i.e. test out cross-border aspects and scalability challenges, for examples. FDO One therefore started discussions with several strong institutions worldwide to sign memorandum of understandings with the intention to integrate their repositories and in doing so build a worldwide FDO domain. It has already been clarified that for the ramp-up phase  training courses must be given, synchronisation meetings need to be organised and a coordination board needs to be established. In parallel, the knowledge about efficiently developing adapters and validation procedures to check FDO compliance needs to be improved.

Four goals can already be identified for the “test operation” phase: (1) The core infrastructure should be deployed at other regional institutions to create redundancy for example. (2) Core FDO applications need to be developed and deployed. (3) Scientific and/or industrial applications should be designed which also include protected data to not only test the usefulness of FDOs, but to also test out the bridges with usage control applications such as EDC. (4) Integrate repositories that are using different implementation types of FDOs.

Given the different backgrounds and state of work of the participating repositories from the different regions we expect that organising the ramp-up phase will already cost some time and effort.

An African FDO Information Day was organised recently to which 144 experts from 22 African countries registered. 7 experts immediately showed their interest to participate in the evolving International FDO Testbed. Together with the African experts we are now working out a strategy to organise a specific series of training courses. We plan now to reach out to other regions such as East Asia and South America.

All information about the African FDO Information Day can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZjYPf0Cw9rCUxC9H6Hmph4GganDa7glt?usp=sharing