"Respect for the marine ecosystem and its preservation is becoming more and more linked to the sharing of the data" (GARR News, 2020)
Analysing and studying oceanic marine data is becoming ever more relevant, given the critical role healthy oceans play in mitigating climate change.
Nevertheless, at the same time it is not always easy to find reliable infrastructures which collect trustworthy and continuously-updated data. As shared by Alessandra Giorgetti, vice-director of the Oceanographic department of OGS, in an interview for GARR News in 2020, “Collecting marine data is expensive. But thanks to European infrastructures, we can store and reshare the data, overcoming the barriers in re-utilising them”.
Giordano Giorgi, a data analyst at ISPRA, also interviewed by GARR News, mentioned that having a high quantity of data is an opportunity as they offer a great deal of information. On the other hand, higher attention to transferring, archiving and standardising the data is needed. Hence, having a unique repository which can easily store the data the users need is beneficial.
Their statements summarise well one of the main benefits of the Blue-Cloud project: providing a marine thematic European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) that researchers can access to find and use FAIR marine data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
The Blue-Cloud project implements a practical approach to address the potential of cloud-based open science to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five real-life Blue-Cloud demonstrators, tackling pivotal areas of marine research:
- Zoo & Phytoplankton Essential Ocean Variables Products
- Plankton Genomics
- Marine Environmental Indicators
- Fish, a matter of scales
- Aquaculture Monitor
Moreover, the project seeks to capitalise on what already exists and to develop and deploy the Pilot Blue-Cloud as a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to multidisciplinary data from observations and models, analytical tools and computing facilities essential for key blue science use cases.
If you want to learn more about the potential of the Blue-Cloud project, click here.
The GARR News edition nr 22 (in Italian) is available here.
