Blue-Cloud Open Science platform as a model for a sustainable Data federation in EOSC: workshop at the EOSC Symposium 2022

The EOSC Symposium is the main EOSC annual event and takes place this year in Prague, Czech Republic, from 14th-17th November 2022 as part of the calendar of events of the Czech presidency of the Council of the EU. Blue-Cloud is organising a workshop at the Symposium, aimed at showcasing the project's unique approach to Data federation, valuable also for many other thematic communities in the EOSC ecosystem.

Workshop details

• Title: Blue-Cloud Open Science platform as a model for a sustainable Data federation in EOSC
• Thursday 17 November 2022, 11:00 - 12:30 CET
• Room: Nadir
• Main organiser: Blue-Cloud
• Session Chair: Sara Pittonet, Trust-IT and Blue-Cloud Coordinator

Blue-Cloud is the thematic marine EOSC, a collaborative Open Science platform in support of the EU Mission Ocean. Blue-Cloud innovative core services are deployed through a smart federation of leading European marine data and einfrastructures, bringing an unprecedented amount of multidisciplinary data repositories, analytical tools, and computing facilities to the EOSC. The Data Discovery & Access Service (DD&AS) provides a successful example of data federation, crucial for the long-term objectives of EOSC. It enables researchers to retrieve data from marine infrastructures including SeaDataNet, EMODnet, Copernicus, Ecotaxa. Data acquired can be exploited in the Virtual Research Environment, accessible via the EOSC federated login, while Blue-Cloud analytical services and interdisciplinary Virtual Labs are  available through the EOSC Exchange.

The Blue-Cloud Open platform is a great example of implementation of the three main components of the EOSC Federation - EOSC-Core, EOSC-Exchange and the Federation of Data & Data Services - into a unique Open Science platform accessible and usable by other research communities.

Blue-Cloud is a front runner of Data federation in practice, given its success in bringing together 9 data providers covering 10M datasets from the marine domain and making them available via the DD&AS and the VRE to users, allowing interdisciplinary interactions between disciplines, thus demonstrating the value of bringing together a variety of providers and users within EOSC.

This session explored the Blue-Cloud Data federation model and its tangible implementation via use cases. A panel of experts from the EOSC Sustainability Task Force, marine data and service providers, and disciplinary communities  discussed why and how to continue sustaining data federation practices in EOSC.

Read the post event report

Visit the EOSC Symposium page for more about the agenda, registration and participation

Speakers

Jessica Klemeier works as a Project Officer at the IT Services department at EMBL in Heidelberg. There, her work mainly revolves around EOSC and other Open Science activities, e.g. as a member of the EMBL Open Science Working Group. Working very closely with Head if IT Services, Dr Rupert Lueck, Jessica also acts as his alternate in the Blue Cloud ESEB. In 2019, Jessica became very closely involved in the work of the Sustainability Working Group of the former EOSC Executive Board which concluded its work at the end of 2020. Since the kick-off of the succeeding EOSC Association Task Force on Financial Sustainability at the end of last year, Jessica is alternate member of the Task Force.  

Sara Pittonet Gaiarin is a Senior Project manager at Trust-IT since 2010 and the Coordinator of the Blue-Cloud.eu Project, the Flagship initiative of the Future of the Seas and Oceans programme of the European Commission. As a Communications and Outreach leader for several research H2020 projects and former journalist, she was Outreach Manager for the FAIRsFAIR and ARCHIVER initiatives and currently serving as Outreach Manager of the FAIR-IMPACT project, ensuring dissemination and uptake of the results across Open Science, FAIR, Research Data Management and Data Infrastructures initiative in Europe.

Anton Ellenbroek works in the fisheries department of FAO of the UN to assist the development of affordable data services in support to the sustainable management of marine living resources, especially through the iMarine initiative. This initiative manages already some 10 VREs that all have dedicated services using the D4Science data infrastructure. As coordinator for 2 demonstrators in Blue Cloud, "Fish, a matter of scales" and the "Aquaculture monitor" he intends to improve the understanding in countries of fisheries and aquaculture in a wider ecosystem context for monitoring and planning purposes.

Karl Presser is the founder of Premotec. He trained as a computer scientist and earned his doctoral degree at ETH Zurich investigating data quality on food composition data focusing on basic principles of data quality and how a computer system can support users to manage data quality. After his computer science study, he was a senior scientist in the Department of Computer Science at ETHZ in the Global Information Systems Group. He also worked in an SME as product manager, product designer and developer on an application to calculate timetables for universities using artificial intelligence, in particular evolutionary algorithms. Karl was the primary creator of FoodCASE, an information system to manage food composition data where some research work is incorporated. Karl led or participated in several national and EU funded projects such as FoodCASE project (Swiss national project), MenuCH (Swiss consumption survey), EuroFIR Network of Excellence (FP6), EuroFIR NEXUS (FP7), TDS-Exposure (FP7), PRO-METROFOOD (H2020), and METROFOOD-PP (H2020). He is currently involved in the METROFOOD-RI, FNS-Cloud (H2020), FoodSafety4EU (H2020), DRG4FOOD (H2020) projects. He is also the president of EuroFIR AISBL. He has more than 30 publications and made over 40 scientific presentations and was involved in more than 14 university lectures.

Alessandro Rizzo is a Research Engineer at IRD, the French Institute on Research for Sustainable Development, working on Open Science as enabler for accelerating sustainability and climate change adaptation. In the last years, within the framework of the French Research Infrastructure dedicated to the Earth System, DATA-TERRA, he has been coordinating the work-package focusing on “EOSC in action and Use-cases” in the EOSC-Pillar project, and currently he is the coordinator of FAIR-EASE project.