Goal of ePIC
The assignment of ePIC is to set up and maintain a reliable joint service for registering, storing and resolving persistent identifiers based on handles for the research community.
The ePIC consortium has therefore enabling partner data centers to register PIDs in any number for the data objects and collections they store independent of their possible later use for publications. This registration in general will be done by automated procedures using an API that also allows adding relevant informations such as checksums, pointers to metadata, and rights information.
ePIC is open for any center that stores scientific/research data.
Organization
ePIC currently consist of the following members:
CLARIN: European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology
CNIC: Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
CSC: IT Center for Science
CSCS: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
DKRZ: Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum
GRNET: Greek Research and Technology Network
GWDG: Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen
SND: Swedish National Data Center
SURF: SURF is the collaborative ICT organization for higher education and research in the Netherlands
The management board of the consortium consists of representatives of the full members. The chair of the management is voted always for one year period and is currently
- Tibor Kálmán (GWDG)
Characteristics of ePIC
ePIC is setup as a highly reliable, persistent and high performance service. This is achieved through a network of strong data centers in Europe that share the same service, the same API and that have implemented a redundancy scheme. When one center is out of order the other centers will still resolve the PIDs. Currently six data centers share the service, but with the help of the European Union more strong data centers will join ePIC resulting in a broad European coverage. Registered PIDs will not be deleted as long as they are needed or the objects are accessible.