Pre-announcement EPIC PID User Forum 2011

On April 12 and 13, 2011, the second EPIC User Forum will be held at SARA on Science Park Amsterdam. EPIC is an abbreviation of European Persistent Identifier Consortium. The first forum took place on April 19 and 20, 2009 in Göttingen, Germany. EPIC is a joint venture of CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. (Helsinki, Finland), GWDG – Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen, and SARA Computing and Networking Services.

Aim of the EPIC User Forum
The consortium aims to offer European scientists a Persistent Identifier (PID) infrastructure. Persistent Identifiers are unique markers, which can be used to identify digital documents (e.g. text files, web pages, photographs, films, sound files), or specific objects (e.g. paintings, sculptures), so that they can always be traced, even if they have been moved to a different location, or if their URL has changed. It is important that the solution is sustainable over time (persistent). The international collaboration of various institutes in EPIC also stands for robustness in organizational terms, since the user of this service is not dependent on one organization.

Program
A program committee is busy preparing the EPIC User Forum 2011, which will consist of two parts: a technical part and a part on policy development. The technical program will focus among others on:

Providing information on PID’s
Explaining current and future services of EPIC
Identifying the needs and demands of existing and future users

Policy issues, financing, etc. will be discussed as well during this forum.

Given the international character, the event will be in English.

Registration
You will receive notice as soon as the program has been finalized and the event is open for registration. Until then, please contact epic@sara.nl.
Participation is free.

If you know people who might be interested in attending the EPIC 2011 User Forum, please forward this message to them.

I look forward to welcoming you at this evert! Kind regards,

Pieter van Beek <pieterb@sara.nl>
SARA Computing and Networking