AquaINFRA

Mission

The AquaINFRA project aims to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders in restoring healthy oceans, seas, and coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment enables the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects from their discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders leveraging on EOSC and the other existing operational dataspaces. Besides supporting the ongoing development of the EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA is addressing the specific need for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across those two domains.

A specific goal of AquaINFRA is to develop an EOSC-based research infrastructure combining the marine and freshwater domains, which includes the development of a cross-domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. A set of strategic use cases including a Pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities.

Collaboration with Blue-Cloud

AquaINFRA is the sister project of Blue-Cloud, focusing on coastal and inland waters, adopting Blue-Cloud's approach with a Data Discovery and Access Service (DD&AS), a Virtual Research Environment (VRE), and Use Cases.

Blue-Cloud and AquaINFRA have been closely collaborating to bring forward a technical discussion on how to make the data of the two projects interoperable with each other, how to enhance and improve overall marine data quality, and how to cooperate in the area of Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO).