As in previous years, the SZTAKI DSD team developing ARP participated in the EOSC Symposium in November 2025 with a small professional delegation.
One of the developers' goals was to learn about the operation of the EOSC EU Node and the national and thematic nodes launched in the first round in order to explore how Hungary could connect with the results achieved so far by HUN-REN ARP and HUN-REN Cloud.
Based on the experiences gained at the symposium, although the creation of a national federation of Hungarian research infrastructure is still pending, the ARP and Cloud developments to date and those planned for the future can be considered cutting-edge even at the European level. However, due to our circumstances, we are not yet able to compete with similar European infrastructures and services in terms of size and capacity.
During professional discussions, SZTAKI staff repeatedly received the feedback that ARP is significantly more advanced than some of its "competitors" in many respects. For example, there was great interest in ARP's CEDAR-based metadata schema registry and its integration, as well as in solutions related to RO-Crate and RO-Crate profiles. However, based on the reception of the VibeARP project presented during informal discussions, ARP's steps towards "AI for FAIR" - which was one of the key topics of the EOSC Symposium - appear to have been the right move.
Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by EOSC, a key objective is to establish a Hungarian national EOSC node, thereby connecting Hungarian and European research infrastructures. Although this is still a long-term goal, the developers of HUN-REN SZTAKI DSD have already joined several EOSC working groups this year. András Micsik is participating in the EOSC Technical and Semantic Interoperability Task Force, Balázs Pataki in the EOSC FAIR Metrics and Digital Objects Task Force, and László Kovács in the OA2: Metadata, Ontologies and Interoperability group, working on the development of EOSC-compliant policies.
SZTAKI staff were among the first to present the results of ARP development in the field of metadata and metadata schema interoperability in the EOSC Technical and Semantic Interoperability Task Force. The development covers the creation and application of metadata schemas and their use in RO-Crate data packages and the ARP Federated Search, thanks to the integrated operation of several ARP components.
Images: https://eosc.eu/people/eosc-symposium-2025-brussels-day-1-03-november-2025/