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Image: Fabien Barral via Unsplash
Vision now reality - CESSDA’s high quality Technical Infrastructure is ready to go
Mon 22 Oct 2018

The running theme of the CESSDA Expert Seminar 2018 (CES2018) was “ensuring common standards”.

CES2018 focused on two separate topics. Firstly, the CESSDA Technical Infrastructure (such as development guidelines and quality standards) and secondly, the development, testing and deployment of CESSDA Tools and Services (using automated testing and deployment tools, and containerisation and clustering techniques) in the cloud.

CES2018 took place on 26 September 2018 at the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives - ADP in Ljubljana. It was led by the CESSDA Technical Working Group.

John Shepherdson, CESSDA Platform Delivery Director and leader of the CESSDA Technical Working Group chaired the seminar and stated that:

“Significant progress has been achieved since the last meeting two years ago. This has enabled social science data archives across Europe to develop and deliver high quality tools and services to run on the CESSDA technical infrastructure.”

Two years on, CESSDA has:

  • Set up a sophisticated development and test environment (based on Bitbucket, Jenkins, Selenium and SonarQube) that is available to all service providers;
  • Extended its set of procedures and guidance documents, that tell software developers how to design and deploy tools and services for CESSDA;
  • Improved the reproducibility, reliability and scalability of the components that form part of the tools and services, by adopting containerisation (Docker) and clustering (Kubernetes) technologies;
  • Developed a number of tools that will be soon made available to the European social science research community (including a CESSDA Data Catalogue and Vocabularies Manager).

Attendees of the seminar were CESSDA Service Provider staff working on the implementation of CESSDA Tools and Services and of their own back office systems.

More information:

Presentations available here.

Pictures available here.

Past event - CES2016: Vision on! CESSDA’s Expert Seminar shows the way (CESSDA news); CESSDA leading the way on technical infrastructure (UK Data Service news)