A one-year-long consultation and prototyping phase has resulted in concrete plans for establishing data subsetting capabilities in the Blue-Cloud ecosystem and implementing that vision by deploying a series of data lakes at the Blue-Cloud VRE for data repositories and data collections in support of VRE users and developers of the WorkBenches.
By working closely with long-term EU marine data services (i.e., EMODnet, Copernicus), and research data infrastructures (i.e., EuroArgo, SeaDataNet, Ecotaxa and others), the Blue-Cloud project is offering to the marine community a state-of-the-art cyber platform designed to implement an incubator of new research ideas, supporting scientists and researchers in designing, testing, and evaluating innovative computational analytical flows that extract valuable knowledge from diverse datasets, while accelerating open science and collaborative research in ocean sustainability.
Blue-Cloud 2026 builds upon the pilot Blue-Cloud project, which established a pilot cyber platform that provides researchers access to multi-disciplinary datasets from observations, analytical services, and computing facilities essential for blue science.
Since the launch of Blue-Cloud 2026, the project team has proactively worked on establishing strong partnerships and synergies with other projects and initiatives in the Open Science and DTO environments, aiming to create long-lasting relationships to attain the Blue-Cloud's long-term objectives. The team strongly believes that through collaboration and cooperation with initiatives operating in similar fields, the value of Blue Cloud services increases.
The Blue-Cloud project started in 2019, under the H2020 EU's research and innovation funding programme, with the aim of creating a European Open Science Cloud for marine data. This involves federating data and e-infrastructures to provide data products and technologies as open science resources for the wider marine research community. Since 2023, the Horizon Europe Blue-Cloud 2026 follow-up project has been advancing this pilot ecosystem into a Federated European Ecosystem.
Essential Ocean Variables (EOV) and Essential Biodiversity variables (EBV) are critical for the analysis of the state of the environment and for numerical simulations, which can now be exposed to wider audiences and be used to accelerate Ocean knowledge and deepen our understanding of the trade-offs of human activities in the marine environment thanks to the potential brought by ongoing efforts to co-construct the European Digital Twin Ocean (DTO).
The Horizon Europe Blue-Cloud initiative started in 2019 with the aim of creating a European Open Science Cloud for marine data. This involves federating data and e-infrastructures to provide data products and technologies as open science resources for the wider marine research community. Since 2023, the Blue-Cloud 2026 follow-up project has sought to further evolve this pilot ecosystem into a Federated European Ecosystem, offering FAIR and open data and analytical services crucial for advancing research on oceans, EU seas, and coastal and inland waters.
The main goal of Blue-Cloud 2026 WP6 is to promote and disseminate the project ambition, on-going activities and Key Exploitable Results (KERs) to the identified list of key stakeholder groups throughout content-rich communication activities, via multi-channel user-centric campaigns. This is done through consistent and content-rich communication activities, by using multiple integrated communication tools. The success of this mission is highly dependent on a continuous interaction with all WPs.
The European Digital Twin Ocean (EU DTO) initiative, announced by President von der Leyen, aims to harness digital technology to provide comprehensive knowledge of the ocean. The European Digital Twin of the Ocean seeks to provide an innovative set of user-driven, interactive and decision-making tools backed by the best science and data. Its core development is underway with the European Union (EU) funding through the European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO) R&D projects.
