19^th International CODATA Conference
Category: Scientific Informatics Challenges in EurAsia

Scientific Databases in Poland

Antoni Nowakowski (antowak@biomed.eti.pg.gda.pl)
Gdansk University of Technology, Poland
http://www-med.eti.pg.gda.pl

Development, organization and accessibility to scientific databases in Poland are presented. Situation in this field seems to be unique as for several years initiatives concerning development of scientific databases have been supported by the State Committee for Scientific Research (nowadays, since 2003, this institution acts as the highest rank state institution - Ministry of Science and Information).

All formally started in 1995, when The program of development of informatic infrastructure for science 1995 - 2000 was accepted, followed in 2000 by PIONIER - Polish optical internet, the programme to be today at the final stage of advancement. First, with a great care and consequence the development of technical infrastructure was supported. The main goal was to access by the year 2000 all who are working in Polish scientific institutions, giving them not only high quality of network facilities but also a lot of services, including broad accessibility to high performance computing and to all informatic services important in the modern world. This was not an easy task taking into account the transitional (politically) period of Polish history and in general rather low level of financing in science, especially comparing to developed economies. Today one may claim that the programmes have been successfully implemented resulting in development of national and regional computer networks run by the consortium of Polish scientific institutions and forming at the moment part of the Geant; five high performance computer centres (HPCC) in:

Warsaw - http://www.icm.edu.pl, Krakow - http://www.cyf-kr.edu.pl,
Poznan - http://www.man.poznan.pl/pcss/public/main/index.html,
Gdansk - http://www.task.gda.pl/, Wroclaw http://www.wcss.wroc.pl

and a lot of services, including scientific databases developed all around Poland and accessible by the net. It should be underlined that in parallel to infrastructure development great efforts have been devoted to proper dissemination of knowledge in this field by organisation series of regular conferences and education programmes.

At the beginning HPCCs have been supported to build the core of network services including accessibility to main world databases. Additionally scientific institutions have been supported for building library and specific scientific databases. The first conference INFOBAZY - data bases for science in Poland - was organised in 1997, followed by regular meetings in 1999, 2002 and 2005, to be organized soon. In TASK, HPCC in Gdansk, a special data base - INFOBAZA - http://infobaza.task.gda.pl - gathering information of content and accessibility to scientific data bases spread in all Polish scientific institutions and on software available in HPCCs in Poland is in operation since 1999. The main problem is to keep this information up-dated; what is not an easy task. Promotional role of the Polish Chapter CODATA should be here underlined.