The 2016 General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU 2016) will be held on 17–22 April in Vienna, Austria. The Earth & Space Science Informatics (ESSI) Programme Group is of specific interest and relevance to ICSU-WDS. In particular, we would like to encourage members and the wider community to contribute abstracts to the following two sessions (deadline for submissions: 13 Jan 2016 at 13:00 CET).

• ESSI2.4: International cross-project collaboration and interoperability of data management systems.
  This session is co-convened by Bernd Ritschel and Wim Hugo (Vice-chair of the WDS Scientific Committee).
   
• ESSI2.6/GI1.6: 20 years of persistent identifiers - where do we go next?
  ICSU-WDS is contributing directly to the organization of this session.

More generally, sessions of the ESSI Programme Group can be located by selecting ESSI from the conference programme page.