Today, 12 October 2020, we are launching an online consultation asking the marine community to help us shape the future of the “Blue-Cloud”, an open, web-based cyberspace where marine researchers and innovators will come together to share data and advance ocean knowledge through collective intelligence.
The Blue-Cloud project aims to demonstrate the potential of federating Europe’s prime distributed marine data resources, HPC platforms and analytical services to set up a coherent cyberplatform that provides a single research & innovation hub for the marine research and the Blue Economy communities.
This will be done through five real-life demonstrators that cover key areas for the marine domain, like biodiversity, genomics, environment, fisheries and aquaculture, involving leading European and international organisations. Interested in learning more about it? You can discover the demonstrator on fisheries, developed by FAO, ICS-FORTH and IRD, in the webinar held on 14 October.
The Blue-Cloud will seek to:
- Facilitate marine research by enhancing and bringing to the next level the access to multidisciplinary Ocean data and the provision of services supporting marine research.
- Equip researchers & scientists with tools, data and capacity aimed at improving their productivity and results.
- Enable new ICT tools, new skills and boost new business opportunities in the blue economy.
- Trigger innovative ways to better address grand societal challenges in the area of Ocean sustainability.
Blue-Cloud federates an initial list of blue data infrastructures, but we seek to welcome new infrastructures in the future.
The Roadmap to 2030
Input from stakeholders is key to ensure that this ambitious initiative is shaped according to their needs and expectations from its outset, building a shared, co-created and collective vision. The contributions will be used to develop a Roadmap to 2030 that guides the development and expansion of the Blue-Cloud successfully towards its vision.
The Roadmap will be a policy document providing the basis for the future strategic development of the Blue-Cloud well embedded as a leading system in the wider marine community, and as a component of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This Roadmap will investigate how Blue-Cloud can effectively and efficiently contribute to address the key issues highlighted by international initiatives, such as the EU Green Deal and the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
It will consider technical developments, user demand and needs, market analysis and opportunities for exploitation of Blue-Cloud resources, while providing options that ensure sustainability of Blue-Cloud services and interoperability with the EOSC ecosystem. The online consultation closes on Friday 6 November.
It will take you approximately 15 minutes to complete the survey, let's start!
