The European Union has invested six million Euros in the project DASISH to facilitate cooperation between different research infrastructures.
DASISH stands for "Data Service Initiative for Social Science and the Humanities" and is coordinated by SND. Five European infrastructures participate in the project which is part of the EU's 7th framework program and will run until December 2014. The organizations involved are CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), DARIAH (Digital Reserach Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives), ESS (European Social Survey) and SHARE (Survey of Health, Age and Retirement in Europe).
- It is a very extensive collaboration, in total we are 76 people actively involved in the project. SND has eight people participating in one way or another, says Michelle Coldrey, project manager for DASISH and responsible for the communication between the participants.
The project has identified four major areas as important to coordinate. The first two deal with data archiving and data quality. The other two concern data access and legal and ethical issues related to data management. Specifically, it could involve questions like the development of software for Europe-wide surveys so that they can collect and code occupation data more accurately and consistently. It may also, among other things, include improving metadata quality through shared information and training.