The Reference Model for Social Science and Humanities Data Infrastructures: towards a common architectural model for Research Infrastructure architectures

Research (data) infrastructures are primarily challenged by their own distributed nature. They consist of organisations who provide various types of services in different countries, with different business models & national environments, leading to different implementation of the services and standards. A prerequisite for addressing these challenges is a common understanding about the nature of the infrastructure, the diverse objectives of participants, functions and solutions. A common vision, model and architecture are instrumental in providing the foundation for this common understanding, as is a framework to identify and relate important aspects for central stakeholders. Furthermore it is an essential step for the alignment of the technical implementations with the high-level goals.

The Reference Model for Social Sciences and Humanities (RM-SSH) is an abstract model identifying and describing the concerns and related behaviour that infrastructures share, and translates these into common types of information and computation. Thus allowing for consistent internal development, maintenance, operation, and for the identification of opportunities for the development of interoperable and shared services and standards.

In this presentation we will discuss the viewpoints that form the core of the RM-SSH, the current usage of the model across infrastructures, its possible application to new infrastructures, and future developments.