EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It offers cutting edge tools to build digital twins, support science-based decision making, and ensure maximum impact for research & innovation actions across the key objectives of the EU Mission Ocean & Waters.
Developed in the framework of the “EU Public Infrastructure for the European Digital Twin Ocean” (EDITO-Infra) project (Oct 2022- Feb 2025), and the “EDITO 2” project (Mar 2025 – Aug 2028), EDITO is intended to evolve into a long-term, sustained European infrastructure extending beyond the lifetime of these projects. Its development is led by Mercator Ocean International (MOi) and the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), on behalf of Copernicus Marine Service and EMODnet, respectively, currently with the support of Seascape Belgium as EMODnet Secretariat.
Unified data services & processing for faster, more accurate Ocean insights
Building on existing European assets, the public infrastructure platform of the EU DTO upgrades, combines and integrates data and services from the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) and the Copernicus Marine Service into a single digital framework. By building on these established European infrastructures, EDITO harmonizes high-resolution ocean observation data, forecasts, and analysis. It also incorporates advanced computing resources, such as cloud and high-performance computing (HPC), to enable complex simulations and “what if” scenarios. This digital framework provides the foundation for the further development of the European Digital Twin Ocean.
What does EDITO offer? To whom?
To respond to different service needs and expectations from users, the EDITO service offer has been structured around 3 levels of entry and interaction with the EDITO platform, namely:
- EDITO Create: This service targets advanced users (B2C), such as marine scientists and developers, who are looking for fast access to ocean data, fast processing and computing capacity, advanced tools and models to be combined in workflows and/or in a development environment. It offers them tools, models, and a collaborative virtual environment that they can harness to build digital twins, generate new marine information, and/or innovative ways to use them.
- EDITO Contribute: This service is targeted at “institutional” or “business” level users (B2B), including research projects, institutes, or private companies. It offers them tools to share their twinning developments, marine data, and/or services with the wider community, thereby becoming part of the EU DTO ecosystem.
- EDITO Explore: This service caters to all users, regardless their nature (physical persons or legal entities) and/or level of technical expertise. It offers users the possibility to explore and navigate the resources of the platform without having to register and without adding new information nor creating anything new on the platform.
The EDITO service offer is geared at enabling the marine community to contribute to the co-creation of the EU DTO, while sparking an innovative knowledge ecosystem that gradually and organically evolves and scales up to expand its reach beyond expert users, to cater to non-expert users. The ambition behind the offer is to deliver on the promise of servicing decision makers across the public and private sector, civil society, and ultimately citizens.
- How is EDITO different from the European Digital Twin Ocean?
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EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It services and supports the ecosystem of research and innovation activities, projects, and initiatives, that are working to develop science-based, digital ocean models, twins and applications, connecting them and making them interoperable towards jointly co-constructing the EU DTO.
- How is EDITO different from EMODnet and/or Copernicus Marine?
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EDITO is a data lake (a high-speed central storage) of all EMODnet and Copernicus Marine products. Located beside the data are virtual machines that run e.g., Jupyter notebooks, Python, etc. The concept is that, if you want to process Big Data, then you bring your code to EDITO rather than download the data sets. When you access https://datalab.dive.edito.eu/ you are running your code on virtual machines beside the data. You are still free to download data from the existing EMODnet and Copernicus Marine Portals to work on locally. EDITO is a complementary service focused on providing Cloud Computing services and the data products on the respective portals are identical to what is available through EDITO.
How can potential users engage with EDITO?
During the initial, set up phase of EDITO (Oct 2022 - Feb 2025), key members of the oceanographic community (i.e., related to EMODnet and Copernicus Marine services), and targeted Horizon Europe research & innovation projects (i.e., EDITO Model Lab) were engaged to co-design the EDITO platform, and early-access was provided to a larger panel of users following specific calls for access, as beta-testers (e.g., DTO-BioFlow, Blue-Cloud, ILIAD, amongst many others).
During the next phase of EDITO (Mar 2025 – Aug 2028), EDITO will continue establishing links across the EU DTO ecosystem of research and innovation activities, projects, and initiatives, as part of its commitment to working in co-construction with the community towards a fully-fledged, fit-for-purpose European DTO. By engaging in open calls and targeted community building activities, the community will be able to tap on EDITO to host, process, and disseminate their findings. EDITO will also support regional and thematic applications of the EU DTO by enabling the development of "local twins," as tailored digital tools addressing specific priorities of local stakeholder communities. These local twins will be particularly relevant in the Mission’s lighthouse areas—Atlantic-Arctic, Mediterranean Sea, Baltic-North Sea, and Danube-Black Sea—where they help implement and demonstrate restoration strategies in context-specific ways. Moreover, the infrastructure will continue to align with cross-sectoral initiatives and global collaborations. For instance, through its interoperability with programs like Destination Earth and international efforts such as the UN DITTO Program.
How is Blue-Cloud related to EDITO?
The Horizon 2020 “Blue-Cloud pilot” (2019-2023) and Horizon Europe “Blue-Cloud 2026” (2023-ongoing) projects were foreseen as testing grounds for advancing open science in the marine domain and as precursors of the European Digital Twin Ocean. As Blue-Cloud 2026 comes to an end (June 2026), and in view of the new public infrastructure developed to support the EU DTO, namely EDITO, the output knowledge and results of these projects will be integrated into EDITO for long-term exploitation and sustainability.
Blue-Cloud’s know-how will be harnessed to bridge EDITO to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), contributing to support major EU marine date services -such as EMODnet and Copernicus Marine- and related EDITO knowledge assets in driving data provision into EOSC via a dedicated marine thematic node. These efforts will further continue to stress the importance of using EC operational services for in situ and satellite marine data sharing, and promote data ingestion directly to EMODnet and Copernicus Marine, for the benefit of the wider EOSC community and the EU DTO.