WP7

In the current scientific data landscape, we find a variety of different data access and management methods and techniques. To build a collaborative data infrastructure it is most important to use a standard interface to archives to lower the barriers between the sciences and to abstract from the technical structure underneath. Such an interface must be general and match the requirements of the scientific communities to be useful. It must also be maintainable over a longer time frame and extensible to adapt to changes in the data landscape. In the following, we show a roadmap toward a standard interface based on the needs of scientific users, best practices, and current trends in computing and storage.