This project developed from having the aim of creating an effective infrastructure for the European social science community, to having a fully operational web-based one, which contains a wide range of data and resources from a number of providers.

The overall goal of the MADIERA project was to develop an effective infrastructure for the European social science community by integrating data with other tools, resources and products of the research process. By the end of the project, a fully operational web-based infrastructure had been placed, populated with a variety of data and resources from a selection of providers. The aim was to provide a common integrated interface to the resources of the majority of the existing 20+ social science data archives in Europe including several newly established archives in the candidate countries.

The MADIERA portal provides access to social science quantitative datasets from all the largest European social science data archives. It harvests these resources down to variable level and organises them, using a set of multilingual thesauri and taxonomies, to make them available through a responsive and highly customisable web interface.

The portal has been further developed within the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) community to cover the holdings of all of its 20+ members. However the infrastructure has, as does the web itself, the capacity to grow and diversify to potentially create a sustainable system for the whole of the data and knowledge producing communities of the European Research Area.

Archive contribution

The Archive led two work packages on Multilingual Functionality and Content Provision with major contributions to the Metadata and Standards Development work package.

Principal investigator:   Atle Alvheim
Funder:  EU IHP-Programme - Fifth Framework
Dates:  December 2002 - February 2006
Contact:  Hilary Beedham
Links:  MADIERA report