The Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) was featured as an EOSC in practice story by the EOSC Future project, which interviewed Blue-Cloud 2026 Scientific and Administrative Coordinator Pasquale Pagano, CNR-ISTI, about its concept and implementation.
There are several research infrastructures or other data services running in Europe that cover a multitude of marine-related sciences, providing specific datasets coming from observations collected with different methods.
These infrastructures constitute a diverse world, each looking at a piece of the big picture, sometimes hindering collaboration and data sharing. Blue-Cloud aims to overcome fragmentation and build a bridge between thematic science clusters - such as marine, climate, food and agriculture sciences - and EOSC, creating a data federation and providing a common access to a so-called thematic EOSC for marine data. By connecting leading marine data management infrastructures with horizontal e-infrastructures, the project aims to maximise the exploitation of data resources available from different sources.
The Blue-Cloud framework consists of two major technical components:
- a Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access service, already presented in a previous EOSC in practice story, to serve federated discovery and access to blue data infrastructures, and
- a Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to provide computing platforms and analytical services facilitating the collaboration between researchers, which is detailed hereafter.
Read the EOSC in Practice story
Source: EOSC Portal
