The first Blue-Cloud Federation Workshop, held at the Instituto Hydrográfico in Lisbon on 6th November 2024, brought together more than 40 partners from the Blue-Cloud consortium, alongside representatives from marine research infrastructures and initiatives. The aim of the meeting was to address the need to share open science practices and advancements in digital tools and services for European researchers working on marine and oceanic challenges. Through presentations and round table discussions, participants explored approaches to facilitate the sharing of best practices and interoperable workflows in line with the European Commission's Ocean Pact and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Zoi Konstantinou, Policy Officer at the European Commission's DG MARE, opened the workshop by highlighting the need for a sustainable approach to marine knowledge and the importance of coordinated efforts. The Commission is committed to improving transparency and access to marine knowledge to support sustainable development. Konstantinou introduced the European Commission's Ocean Pact, which will provide a framework for improving marine data sharing and collaboration between EU Member States.
Presentations spanned from detailed presentations of the Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and Data Discovery & Access Service (DDAS), to interactive panel discussions and demonstrations, but a key moment of the day was the official signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between FAIR-EASE and Blue-Cloud, with both projects working on a series of common approaches and best practices applied to data services and data analysis.
Take a look at the pictures from the event!
The Blue-Cloud Federation workshop was Blue-Cloud 2026's first attempt to bring together multiple research infrastructures and projects active in the marine and oceanic landscape to discuss solutions for innovating and strengthening the FAIRness of their services. The role of Blue-Cloud as a "Science Factory" was introduced, a cloud-based environment to leverage resources, design replicable workflows, and conduct experiments that, by empowering open science practices, can ultimately help the research community address major oceanic challenges collaboratively, more quickly, and reliably.
The workshop reaffirmed Blue-Cloud's commitment to FAIR data standards, providing an accessible platform that enables researchers to contribute to and benefit from interoperable data archives in support of open science principles.
