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Data Publishing

Service provision

The EIDF guarantees, to the best of its ability, to continue its services until at least the 31 March 2032 and aims to continue beyond 2032 subject to funding. However, should we have to terminate the service we will give you at least 3 months notice to retrieve your data. It is thus important to keep your contact details up to date. The publishing service is not an archiving service and we recommend where possible that you have a backup version of your data outside of the EIDF.

We reserve the right to remove any data that is not legal or inappropriate as well as any data that remains at the end of service provision.

Some basic assumptions -

  • You already have a SAFE account and can access the EIDF portal. Otherwise consult the EIDF portal documentation before proceeding.
  • To qualify for the free data publishing service your data must be open and freely available to all. If you want to control access to your data you should use the S3 service instead. This is not a free service.
  • There is no charge for this service if your data can be processed with free tools, distributed and used freely without restriction, and fits within our fair usage policy.

Applying for a data project

To start the process you will need to apply for an EIDF data project which is slightly different from other EIDF project applications.

In the EIDF portal:

  • Press on the Your project applications link.
  • Press on the New Application link and put in an application for us to host your data.
  • You will be asked to supply a title for your application.
  • A start date (when you hope to start publishing your data).
  • A proposed end date (at the moment you will not be able to go beyond 31-Dec-2032).

For the EIDF Services you require chose the "ingest data formally into EIDF for long-term hosting" choice. Note that all the other EIDF services have a cost so, if you add any other EIDF services a charge will be imposed.

Be sure to describe the dataset(s) that you wish to ingest. Submit your application. Your application will be reviewed and you will be notified if your project has been approved or rejected - someone may be in touch to clarify points in your application.

Once your data project has been approved we will create an organisation in our EIDF Data Catalogue. The Data Catalogue is a customised CKAN instance, an open source application for data management systems. We map EIDF projects to CKAN organisations. A CKAN organisation allows you to brand your organisation, allow you to provide metadata to aid the discovery of your data and to publish your datasets together with metadata specific to those data sets.