About
About IENN
IENN — the Irish ESFRI Node Network — is a grassroots, cross-domain forum for Ireland's national nodes within the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). It has no formal or official connection to the European ESFRI forum. It began as an open initiative formed by three of Ireland's existing ESFRI nodes, DARIAH-Ireland, ELIXIR-Ireland, and ISSDA, to bring the country's ESFRI-facing communities into a single, coordinated conversation. While it is a grassroots effort, we hope to actively engage with the government departments responsible for and engaged with ESFRIs (such as DFHERIS) to support Ireland's research infrastructure.
Why IENN exists
- Act as an open, cross-domain forum connecting Irish researchers to a gateway to Europe.
- Reduce redundancy across Ireland's ESFRI-related investments.
- Ensure alignment on common technological and infrastructural needs across domains.
- Provide a unified, coordinated voice for Ireland's research domains in ESFRI-related matters.
- Collaborate on shared projects and initiatives, including the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), EOSC Ireland, and the HORIZON Europe INFRADEV funding programme.
Our goal
Our goal is to support researchers across all domains with well-provisioned research infrastructure, backed by ESFRIs that meet Ireland's needs with European and global solutions that actually work in practice.
Part of that means aligning over shared infrastructure, and ensuring systems are interoperable via metadata and data standards — and especially FAIR data and Open Science — which we consider core to a healthy research ecosystem.
ESFRIs also play an important role in Ireland's wider research infrastructure landscape: representing research needs and domains as EOSC Ireland is built up, and providing valuable context for national investment such as INSPIRE — Ireland's national research infrastructure investment programme (Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science / Research Ireland).
Stakeholders
Researchers
The end-users of ESFRI infrastructure — the reason IENN exists.
Infrastructure Providers
ESFRIs, EIROs, and national nodes delivering the infrastructure itself.
Funders
Research Ireland and national investment such as INSPIRE.
Government
DFHERIS, and departments like Health given EHDS and data-space relevance.