The Blue-Cloud project has piloted a digital platform and services showcasing how web-based Open Science can enhance the marine knowledge value chain in support of greater societal objectives, namely those seeking to address Ocean challenges and opportunities associated with the delivery of the EU Green Deal and UN Agenda 2030.
Blue-Cloud aims to become the reference point for the "Blue community" in the need of data, analytics tools and computing resources in EOSC and in the future Blue Economy & marine research landscape.
Blue-Cloud aims to pilot a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to: 1) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, 2) analytical tools, & 3) computing facilities essential to support research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability.
The Blue-Cloud project aims to pilot a cyber platform bringing together and providing access to: 1) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, 2) analytical tools, & 3) computing facilities essential to support research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability.
Data management will be an integrated activity throughout the project lifetime and should be deployed and supported by the Blue-Cloud services as planned.
The Blue-Cloud kick-off meeting took place in Pisa, Italy, from the 2nd to the 4th of October 2019. Attended by 40 project members and by the Blue-Cloud Policy Officer, for a full duration of two days, the kick-off meeting was fundamental to initiate the Blue-Cloud project activities with the right pace. The mission, the objectives of the project, the technical concept, the current and future assets and their adoption, impact and future sustainability have been discussed. The project coordination and management procedures have also been agreed.
The objective of Blue Cloud is to federate access to some data services at EU level, to ease discovery and enable cross-discipline work. The data access and discovery service covers the following infrastructures:
The Blue Cloud data discovery and access service is one of the components of the Blue-Cloud technical framework. It serves federated discovery and access to a range of blue data infrastructures for external users and also will interact with the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (the component federating computing platforms and analytical services). The pilot Blue-Cloud project aims at federating initially in total 10 blue data infrastructures.
The Blue-Cloud Service platform will enable, among other services, discovery and access of digital objects from the marine science domain via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) framework. For that purpose, the Discovery and Data Access Service which Blue-Cloud is developing will be made accessible through the EOSC Portal, by harvesting metadata from the domain-specific Blue-Cloud Data Discovery and Access Service and publishing in EUDAT-B2FIND, EOSC's generic and interdisciplinary discovery service.
This report D2.6 describes the Blue Cloud architecture as it is known at Month 9. It is the first release of the architecture as it is expected that the actual development and implementation of the Blue Cloud system will provide further challenges and elaborated details. For that purpose, two more releases of the architecture document are planned, namely report D2.7 in Month 15 and report D2.8 in Month 27.
The technical framework of the pilot Blue-Cloud will feature:
This deliverable D2.7 describes the Blue Cloud architecture as it is known at Month 20. It is the second release of the architecture and an update of the earlier 1st release of the Blue-Cloud architecture document D2.6. It is expected that there will be further developments and refinements to the Blue Cloud system. For that purpose, one more release of the architecture document is planned, namely report D2.8 in Month 27.
The Blue-Cloud innovation potential will be explored and unlocked by developing five dedicated Demonstrators as Virtual Labs together with excellent marine researchers. For that purpose, Blue-Cloud selected five varied and domain-coverage rich scientific demonstrators. The objective is to develop and deploy a Virtual Lab for each demonstrator, which will become part of the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE) and as such will be made accessible for users. The D4Science e- infrastructure will be the core platform for the VRE.
