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H2020 interim evaluation questionnaire for e-infrastructure projects

  • Stephanie MATT profile
    Stephanie MATT
    21 September 2016 - updated 4 years ago
  • 17 comments
    Total votes: 1

The interim evaluation of Horizon 2020 is a mandatory requirement from the Regulation (EU) No 1291/2013 establishing Horizon 2020. The purpose of the evaluation is to provide an assessment of the Horizon 2020 Programme at mid-term of its implementation. The interim evaluation will contribute to improving the implementation of Horizon 2020 and will provide a solid evidence base for designing future activities and initiatives. In fact, the results will be used to prepare for the ex-ante impact assessment of the future Framework Programme for Research (starting in 2017).

The expert panel in charge of conducting the interim evaluation of Horizon 2020 activities carried out under the responsibility of DG CNECT is interested in collecting evidence to help them assess the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and EU added value of the e-infrastructure part of Horizon 2020. For this purpose, we have put forward the set of questions below addressed to all projects benefiting from H2020 funding under the e-infrastructures programme.

We would be grateful if you could reply by the 30th of September 2016 keeping your answers brief and to the point. Answers should be submitted online and they should include the name of the project in the Subject field.

Your answers are essential to define the future e-infrastructure Horizon 2020 programme!

 

  1. e-infrastructure project. Indicate which H2020 e-infrastructure project you represent.
  2. Relevance. Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc. 
  3. Effectiveness. Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan.
  4. Efficiency. Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. Were things built and stand idle or are they used? You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area? Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?  
  5. Coherence. To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?
  6. EU added value. Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?
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e-infrastructuree-infrastructuresH2020questionnaireconsultationinterim evaluation

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Florian Berberich's picture
Florian Berberich,
06/10/2016 19:21

1. e-infrastructure project. Indicate which H2020 e-infrastructure project you represent.

PRACE-4IP project, www.prace-ri.eu

2. Relevance. Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc.

The objectives of PRACE-4IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities. These include: assisting the transition to PRACE 2; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing advanced training which so far provided more than 15.000 persontraining days to over 7350 persons, (PRACE-4IP 1800 users in the first 15 months), preparing strategies and best practices towards exascale computing, coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services, and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures (support for the preparatory access type C: 7 projects were supported in the first 15 months, SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe: 19 projects were selected and supported by PRACE-4IP) .

3. Effectiveness. Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan.

Compared against e-infrastructures in USA, China or Japan PRACE is providing services in pace with comparable HPC infrastructures (XSEDE, RIST)
• Resources
PRACE awarded more than 12.2 thousand million core hours since 2010 through peer review process, main criterion being scientific excellence. Open R&D access for industrial users with >50 companies supported industrial usage of resources.
• Training
7 350 people trained by 6 PRACE Advanced Training Centers and others events

4. Efficiency. Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. Were things built and stand idle or are they used? You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area? Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?

The activities of PRACE are designed to increase Europe's research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting start-up for industry and special offers to SMEs; analysing new flexible business models for PRACE 2; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, the coming CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies.

5. Coherence. To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?

PRACE is collaborating with major international HPC infrastructures. Some of the collaborations are formally defined with MoUs. PRACE and XSEDE e.g. run a joint call for proposals to address the interoperability between PRACE and XSEDE resources. Three proposal were selected and supported both from PRACE and XSEDE experts to improve the interoperability. The selected projects addresses:
• Smart Data Analytics for Earth Sciences across XSEDE and PRACE
• UNICORE Use Case Integration for XSEDE and PRACE
• Interoperable High Throughput Binding Affinity Calculator for Personalised Medicine
Data which is treated or produced by PRACE belongs the research group and PI. PRACE promoted open data and open science but has to rely on the individual projects in order to make the data public. However PRACE is requesting the publication of the result as the access is open R&D and is provided for free.

6. EU added value. Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?

PRACE is building a coherent European HPC ecosystem by involving partners form 26 member states. Key elements are
• the access to the HCP resources,
• training and outreach via
o Summer of HPC Programme
o the PRACE Advanced Training Centres
o PRACE Training Centre
o MOOCS
o Seasonal Schools and other training activities,
• support for users on different levels
o SHAPE
o Preparatory access type C and D
o High level support teams

Total votes: 0
Natalia MANOLA's picture
Natalia MANOLA,
06/10/2016 15:38

1. RELEVANCE

OpenMinted has set out to develop a text and data mining (TDM) e-infrastructure by providing concrete services for researchers to collaboratively create, discover, share and reuse knowledge from a wide range of text-based scientific related sources in a seamless way. It primarily works on the following facets:
• Provide a platform where text mining tools and services are registered, discovered, evaluated, combined in a pipeline/workflow, and used by any interested party.
• Provide homogenized access to scientific content (publications) which lies in disparate sources behind paid walls or behind technological barriers.
• Involve experts and the public via the development of a pilot annotation editor for crowdsourcing towards service training and validating.

The project has been running for 15 months and according to the plan the first release of its services will be publicly launched in 4-5 months (beta in January 2017).

Outreach
OpenMinted’s outreach (~50 presentations in workshops and conferences, and organization of six targeted workshops with an attendance of 170 people) indicates the interest of the research community on the topic of TDM, even though infrastructural aspect is sometimes hard to grasp.

OpenMinted’s social outreach (e.g., around 500 twitter followers around the world in the first year of the project BEFORE the first release of its services) shows a strong industry/small business interest and engagement.

2. EFFECTIVENESS
TDM has recently received attention across the world. Current infrastructure initiatives have originated from the language technologies (translation and NLP):

• In US the LAPPS Grid project (http://www.lappsgrid.org/) started in 2012 and focusses on Natural Language Processing components and services. The OpenMinted consortium has established close links with LAPPS Grid to identify commonalities and practices on the interoperability aspects. A difference is the focus of LAPPS Grid focuses on NLP researchers, whereas OpenMinted has a broader scope and includes non-NLP TDM as well.

• In Japan and Asia, the corresponding initiative is the Language Grid (http://langrid.org/en/index.html) which started around 2010. It provides an online multilingual service platform which enables easy registration and sharing of language services such as online dictionaries, bilingual corpora, and machine translators.

Both initiatives do not tackle interoperability at all levels as OpenMinted does which is a critical problem and creates fragmentation and a range of technical, legal and scientific issues. Furthermore, OpenMinted is the first initiative that attempts to make text and data mining services available to researchers at large. It aims to make the processing of text and the extraction of information hidden in it operational, simpler and more user friendly way. It bases its efforts on existing infrastructures: CLARIN and META-SHARE for language resources, OpenAIRE and UK’s CORE for access to scientific content, and ultimately EGI for federation in distributed processing.

3. EFFICIENCY
OpenMinted is primarily about interoperability. Through its working groups (which include consortium members and external experts) OpenMinted has all metadata specifications in place (first public release by Dec 2016), and the interoperability specifications and guidelines for content and service providers are coming up in the next few months.

The OpenMinted registry is in alpha version, currently for internal use, and will be publicly launched in 3-5 months. The registry will include registration and validation modules which will allow service providers to register according to the specification and guidelines. A “corpus building” module will allow content providers (OA repositories and journals via OpenAIRE and CORE, or any type of publisher via well-defined APIs), to make their content available to the research community for TDM. The workflow editor and engine are under development and will come in a second phase of the project.

OpenMinted effectively assists the business development in EU or around the world. Around 2.5 million scientific articles are published every year and studies show that these are not read by the majority of the researchers or cannot reach the industry. The majority of publishers does not, or cannot invest in advanced infrastructures for TDM services (lack of skills) and their content remains unused. Independent business studies agree that TDM is an emerging and important tool that provides insights to science, but it is developing slowly. This is mainly due to the fragmented access to scientific content, an unknown and uncategorized pool of services, and the legal uncertainty caused by today's copyright rules. OpenMinted offers a practical bridging and visibility platform that connects TDM researchers, the industry (SMEs and start-ups) and the scientific community, while promoting Open Access and Open Science practices to overcome any artificial legal barriers.

OpenMinted, even though it is a horizontal e-Infrastucture building services agnostic to scientific domains, is rooted in scientific communities and establishes links based on use cases in the following domains:
• life sciences (discovering knowledge from EBI’s chemical databases, creating and curating a community-based semantic wiki for the neuroinformatics in the Human Brain Project),
• agriculture and food safety (advanced knowledge discovery or automatic linking of different pieces of information as provided by INRA and AgInfra )
• social sciences and humanities (finding SSH data citations in the context of a national infrastructure - GESIS)
• scholary communication and research analytics (enriching and developing value added services for analysis for OpenAIRE and CORE)

Through its focus on scientific publications, OpenMinted very tightly cooperates and leverages the international infrastructure OpenAIRE and the CORE international activity, while for dealing with the intricacies of language it also leverages and builds upon the language infrastructures META-SHARE and CLARIN. Finally, it has strong links to the TDM work in ELIXIR.

4. COHERENCE
By its nature and mandate, there is a clear focus on open access promoting open data and open science practices:

• Content: to overcome imposed legal or technological barriers for accessing scientific content from commercial non-OA publishers, OpenMinted is in close collaboration with OpenAIRE and CORE and will use them as gateways to OA and freely accessible, minable content.
• Services: OpenMinted primarily targets the NLP and TDM research community who are willing to share their services (when used for research purposes, and beyond).
• Processing: the backend cloud services are provided by GRNET, a public cloud infrastructure in Greece, and a member of EGI. This engagement will assist in studying the case of public and commercial use of the underlying processing platform. Open access to the facilities will be promoted, which is a possible study case in the scope of the upcoming European Open Science Cloud.

By design OpenMinted is neutral to research areas, i.e. any scientific research area will be able to use and build upon OpenMinted’s services. Nevertheless, different scientific communities will be able to use the platform to gain scientific insights which will actually improve and speed up their research. Of key importance are the Agriculture and SSH communities involved in the consortium, as they are now starting to explore the value of TDM.

5. EU-ADDED VALUE
OpenMinted adds value at EU level in multiple layers:

Policy
OpenMinted contributes to EC’s two key policies: Open Science and Digital Single Market.
• Open Science: Even though OpenMinted is not about formulating open policies, its mentality, the promotion and all its practices are implementing Open Science policies. Its contribution is obvious as 1. it connects OA content, 2. makes services visible to all researchers and stakeholders, 3. Promotes the use of public cloud infrastructures.
• Digital Single Market: OpenMinted is very active in the recent developments of the EU Copyright and Licenses reform regarding TDM. It essentially provides a hands-on platform for seamless access and processing, a testbed to investigate and validate in practice the implementation of policy and legal frameworks across EU countries.

Interoperability
OpenMinted is mainly about interoperability. It touches upon all layers of a de-centralized and distributed e-Infrastructure: 1. Interoperability of text mining services, 2. Interoperability of content, corpora and other language resources, 3. Interoperability to shared storage and computing resources. It is therefore a perfect use case study in the scope of the European Open Science Cloud, as it combines access to (public or commercial) content and services, which are operated in different (public or commercial) cloud systems, addressing the needs of different communities (for research or non-research purposes).

Services
OpenMinted’s registry for TDM services/tools/applications will be linked and fed to the EU’s and global emerging service catalogues, allowing researchers to easily discover, share and re-use advanced services. Complemented by the underlying workflow, data and processing engines, OpenMinted lowers the learning curve to emerging technologies for novice or non-expert domain specific researchers, or entry level data scientists.

Innovation
TDM is in itself an innovative process, which has the potential to deliver significant productivity gains in the conduct of research. However, the potential of TDM for supporting wider innovation in the economy is even greater, even though clearly measurable with the current practices. OpenMinted is viewed as an accelerator as it brings TDM closer to the market supporting innovation in an EU-wide scale.

Total votes: 1
Mirko Albani's picture
Mirko Albani,
05/10/2016 19:27

1 e-infrastructure project. Indicate which H2020 e-infrastructure project you represent.

EVER-EST a European Virtual Research Environment for Earth Science

2 Relevance. Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc.

The EVER-EST VRE is currently under implementation and will be deployed at the end of first quarter 2017. It will be then validated, fine-tuned and evolved during the third year of the project. The infrastructure is built upon infrastructure modules which have been developed in previous EU Research Projects (6th and 7th Framework) including capabilities for Catalogue Federation, Cloud Processing and Research Object Management. The infrastructure will connect users to the FEDEO catalogue providing access to all ESA (and major European Space Agencies) Earth Observation historical and current missions data catalogues. It will provide Cloud processing capabilities which will leverage on the PSNC supercomputing center facilities. PSNC will also provide a Research Object data management infrastructure and middleware , based on RO-HUB technology which is the core innovation brought to the Earth Science domain by this project. The initial infrastructure will serve a community of almost one hundred scientists – divided into four different VRC’s covering different aspects of the ES domain - which will have a state-of-the art system to share and preserve their researches, together with innovative systems for data publication. The initiative is already working to enhance the user base to accommodate the needs of any generic Earth Science VRC.

3 Effectiveness. Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan.

The EVER-EST team has already built a network of cooperation with other VRE and infrastructures worldwide. While the VRE is still under development, contacts and future cooperation have been setup with the Virtual Laboratories (Australia) for future exploitation. The consortium has also built in cooperation with VRE4IRC a VRE interest group at the Research Data Alliance and will use this international context to promote and foster the use of the platform worldwide.

4 Efficiency. Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. Were things built and stand idle or are they used? You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area? Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?

As mentioned, the infrastructure is still under development. It is domain specific for the Earth Science domain, providing mechanisms to search, access, process and preserve earth science data/results, plus innovative services for sharing data and findings with others. This is all built on the Research Object paradigm, which will allow to create operational workflows within and between ES organizations for cooperative work on different themes. It is a SOA architecture will allow easy plugin of new specific ES services, depending on user’s needs. The logic adopted since the beginning for the development was to start from the practical every-day life of different ES teams and understand how to maximize the impact of the infrastructure on their daily routines: but most of all to understand what are the generic mechanisms behind ES research routines and workflows to identify and anticipate the needs of a future potential community of users, currently unknown.

5 Coherence. To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?

The constant effort of the consortium is to understand, manage and then serve different typologies of ES teams and organizations. Data search and access will be based on OpenSearch standards. Continuous actions are taken to maximize cross-fertilization across VRC’s. The initiative does completely follow the principles for open access (when allowed by the VRC’s organizations participating to the initiative), open data and open science. As already anticipated, the goal is to be ready to integrate, tomorrow, a new community we are not working with today.

EU added value. Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?

EVER-EST has the possibility to change the way many EU Earth Science organization work – within their environment and/or across different organizations. The entire project is built with the idea of maximizing the exchange of data, to slice a research and share it with others, to automatically keep the ownership of implemented workflows and research, which can be used by others. This shall change the approach to research sharing. The initiative will be validated by four strong use cases, covering European Security, European Maritime Research initiatives, Natural Hazards Partnership in UK and Disaster Monitoring through the Supersites worldwide initiative.

Total votes: 0
Adam Farquhar's picture
Adam Farquhar,
05/10/2016 19:24

1. PROJECT
THOR – Technical and Human infrastructure for Open research – http://project-thor.eu

2. RELEVANCE 
The Thor project aims to make the use of persistent identifier services ubiquitous – the new default. It focuses on people and data (along with other key research artefacts). The THOR dashboard (http://dashboard.project-thor.eu/dashboard/) tracks the allocation of ORCID iDs (persistent identifier for people) and DataCite DOIs (persistent identifiers for data and other research artefacts) over time.

The data shows rapid growth – over 100% in 2014 and over 65% in 2015 in both categories of persistent identifier assignment.

In addition, THOR supports integration of persistent identifier services into core databases used by researchers on a daily basis. The project has already integrated services into databases in the life sciences (EMPIAR and Metabolights at the European Bioinformatics Institute), physical sciences (HEPData and Inspire Labs at CERN), and earth and environmental sciences (web services at PANGAEA).

3. EFFECTIVENESS
THOR and its partners provide interoperable services and APIs to enhance the use of persistent identifiers across the research life cycle. The services are available for use world-wide. DataCite and ORCID lead globally in providing persistent identifier services.

Consider DataCite. It’s over 35 members work with more than 725 data centres around the world. The top five countries for DataCite services are the USA, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and Estonia.
Consider ORCID. While 52% of ORCID iDs have been assigned in Europe, 30% are allocated in North America, and 15% in the Asia/Pacific region.

4. EFFICIENCY
The services being developed and enhanced by THOR partners are growing rapidly. Within the project, we integrate persistent identifier services in biological sciences, earth sciences, high-energy particle physics and social science and humanities. The services are being adopted by data centres, repositories, data services, publishers, libraries, research information systems, and can be used in unpredicted, novel situations. They are designed to support private business development.

Persistent identifier services work horizontally across domains. By integrating them into domain specific services, they support user scenarios across disciplines and business sectors.

5. COHERENCE
Persistent identifier services are a key enabler to a wide range of value-adding activities across the open science enterprise and research workflows. For example, they help to ensure that researchers get credit for a fuller range of their contributions, such as creating research datasets. This stimulates earlier and more open data sharing. They help researchers to seamlessly step from article to dataset, enhancing discovery and reuse. They help organisations gather reliable information about research outputs. They help to track and measure the impact of research outputs through accurate citations.

These and other benefits apply across a wide range of research priorities and disciplines.

6. EU ADDED VALUE
Europe leads in the creation, adoption, and integration of persistent identifier services into open science and research workflows.

We are already seeing integration into e-Infrastructure projects within Europe. For example, researcher PIDs are being linked to identities used for authentication and authorisation in AARC. The EUDAT initiative has implemented workflows that register shareable datasets with DataCite’s PIDs. OpenAIRE harvests funding and license information from DataCite metadata, and persistent identifiers for people from ORCID. Rich discussions within the RDA community, interest, and working groups support engagement with the community to improve APIs and services.

Total votes: 0
Yuri Demchenko's picture
Yuri Demchenko,
05/10/2016 19:03

1. e-Infrastructure project

EDISON Project (CSA INFRASUPP-4-2015) http://edison-project.eu/

2. RELEVANCE

The EDISON project conducts a number of coordinating actions to develop a framework for establishing a Data Science professions family (including Data Scientist, Data Steward, curators and Digital Librarians and related professions) what should provide a sustainable basis for a significant increase of the number of academically trained and professionally endorsed Data Science related professionals in the following years.

Measures of the EDISON Data Science Framework (EDSF) adoption may include both societal/qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative measures will include number of universities using EDISON results i.e. EDSF, number of students graduated and trainees trained. Preliminary number after first year of the project indicate that the current community of the Champion universities that follow EDISON recommendations counts 20-30 (based on the first Champions conference on 13-14 July 2016). Many universities are aware and used the first published EDISON documents since November 2015 but more precise number will be defined for the second Champions conference planned in March 2016. The project is also working with a number of European RIs, research institutions, and also with industry.

Qualitative measures will include recognition and wide acceptance of the Data Science professional profiles and organizational role by different sectors of economy on their way to digital transformation. This includes the definition of the major components of the EDSF (Competence Framework, Body of Knowledge, Model Curriculum, Data Science professional profiles, taxonomy and vocabulary) and their acceptance by standardization bodies and professional communities. To achieve this, the EDISON project has established contacts and is working with such organisations as ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations), CEN TC428 Working Group on Digital competences and ICT Professionalism, joint ACM/AIS task force on MSIS 2016 curriculum revision, and few other professional bodies, in particular RDA where EDISON project is actively contributing. The outcome will be officially recognized Data Science professional framework, supported by related standards, and recommendations.

There is no similar projects or initiatives in US, Japan or other countries. There is a growing interest among international communities, organisations and universities. Many contacts are established and project is open for collaboration, in particular with the joint ACM/AIS task force on MSIS 2016 (which is US based).

3. EFFICIENCY.

After the first year of the project, the core Data Science framework has been created and published for open discussion and contribution. Tasks for the second year are to receive wide contribution from the scientific domains, RIs, universities and countries as well as from industry. The project is actively engaged into this activity and uses the following instruments: project website and Data Science Professional portal (to be operational since Jan 2017), Open Access services (OpenAIRE, Zenodo, other), EDISON Liaisons Groups, community targeted workshops organized by the project, Champions Conference. The services and products developed in project are intended to sustain after the project ends. This also includes EDISON Online Educational Environment, Education and Training materials Marketplace, Certification and accreditation frameworks.

By the whole set of activities and measures, the EDISON project targets to facilitate the development of the European Digital Economy, Digital Single Market and provide a sustainable basis for new digital jobs creation and existing workforce re-skilling. The project especially targets SME and self-made Data Scientist to allow them get recognition, formal certification and necessary re/up-skilling. A number of portal based professional services will be provided, including skills benchmarking, individual training/learning path, etc.

4. COHERENCE

The EDISON project is serving European Research Infrastructures (as well as European industry) and responds to their needs in a proactive way. The goals of the proposed EDSF is to make the Data Science and related digital skills complying global standards and transferable what would allow future professionals to build a flexible career path between research infrastructures and industry. The education, training and certification programs will allow future specialists to work in different roles in different organisations as well as different research and industry sectors. This should be based on the core education or training programs and specific domain related expertise and training acquired during their professional work.

5. EU ADDED VALUE

The EDISON Data Science Framework and proposed services (that should sustain) will contribute to creation a new data related professions family for European Research Infrastructure, Digital Single Market and digital economy in general. Current results make real to ensure European leadership in digital skills development area, however full impact will depend on the possibility to utilize the project results outside the academic and research community which are the main project’s target, in particular b industry.

Total votes: 0
Angelo Rossi's picture
Angelo Rossi,
05/10/2016 18:40

# Relevance

Geospatial data are increasingly important for several professional categories, from researchers, up to decision makers and citizens alike. Raster data make a large part of them, either from Remote Sensing sensors on board spacecrafts or from modeling results, such as climate or weather.

EarthServer-2 makes Agile Analytics on Big Earth Data Cubes of sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data a commodity for non-experts and experts alike through. Built and upon its predecessor EarthServer Phase-1 (2011-2014), it aims at exploiting large-scale Petabyte-sized data holdings through open standards, in particular: the OGC Big Data standards and the forthcoming ISO SQL/MDA (“Multi-Dimensional Arrays”) standard.

EarthServer has established client and server technology for such spatio-temporal data-cubes. The underlying scalable Array Database, rasdaman, has enabled direct interaction with databases of several hundred TB. All services exclusively rely on the open OGC data and service standards for "Big Geo Data", the Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite. In particular, the Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) geo raster query language has proven
instrumental as a client data programming language which can be hidden behind appealing visual interfaces, but available for additional clients and ways to access data through the same standards, being developed within the consortium.

EarthServer-2 addresses several communities of remote sensing and modelling raster results users: Earth Observation, Marine science, Planetary science and Weather/Climate modelling. Users of the services after the first year of the project are around 7000, over several hundred TB of diverse datasets, rapidly growing.

====================================

# Effectiveness

In the Joint Research Activity, the project is advancing the existing, world-leading rasdaman Array Database technology with respect to query functionality, integrated data/metadata queries, inter-federation data processing with automatic data and query distribution, tape archive integration, and 3D/4D visualization based on NASA’s virtual globe technology (WebWoldWind, WWW - https://webworldwind.org).

In the Services Activity, large data centers (ECMWF, PML, MEEO/ESA, ANU/NCI, JacobsUni) set up Ocean, Climate, Weather, Earth and Planetary Science data service on 3D & 4D data cubes growing towards Petabyte-size with user-tailored clients for both visual and textual ad-hoc mix&match. Client visualization is supported by NASA's Web World Wind virtual globe. Cross-service data cube access and availability is present, e.g. from MEEO WWW-powered client querying servers across Europe (MEEO) and Australia (ANU/NCI).

EarthServer-2 is actively advancing open Big Data standards in OGC, RDA, and ISO; in particular, the forthcoming ISO Array SQL standard is being written by project members. Further, a number of adequate information channels have been used for strong dissemination & exploitation, specifically with active conference and workshop participation and organization efforts; Earth science data user workshops for each domain addressed; actively contributing technology & experience to GEO / GEOSS and further bodies; establish standardized Big Geo Data benchmark and run it against EarthServer-2 and further relevant systems.

====================================

# Efficiency

The power of the array database approach is that extracting valuable information from very large datasets does not require to download them, but just extract spatial and/or temporal subsets: data served by EarthServer are "drilled" or "sliced" providing discrete access to what is needed by users, either scientific or commercial. The client-server system in this respect is rather agnostic and can be easily tuned to serve both scientific and business use cases.

EarthServer-2 services are targeting mostly open access data. Private business in the area is not harmed by services. On the other hand, the availability of most EarthServer-2 components as either open source or dual use open/proprietary allows for a range of possibilities of technology adoption by businesses. Client software is also open source and available on public repositories such as GitHub by either individual partners or the project as an organization, available for further use and exploitation by the larger community.

Large-scale raster data (scientific) exploitation as well as potential commercial use of EarthServer in combination with other e-infrastructures dealing with cloud computing is possible.

Current figures of EarthServer-2 include:

* 7000+ users of EarthServer-2 services
* 300+ TB (growing) of raster data
* Cross-continent Landsat datacubes cross-queried (MEEO - http://www.meeo.it , NCI - http://nci.org.au)

More information on the technology powering EarthServer-2 is available on: http://earthserver.eu/technologies.

====================================

# Coherence

EarthServer-2 is modular and already global on its own with US and Australia involvement in the project. The use of open standards and open source allows arbitrary increase in the number of data providers anywhere, with the possibility of querying with the same “question” data of different geographic regions, e.g. hosted by national archives across the world, such as Landsat in Australia vs. Europe.

The use of standard queries as part of the data exploitation, primarily OGC WCPS, is a positive component towards reproducibility (raster data of open nature, with well-known Coordinate Reference System, with well-known level of calibration, queried over certain temporal and spatial ranges: all of this can be reproduced and re-used) and open science/data.

Since raster geospatial data are used in most domains ranging from science to hazards to economics or health monitoring, the use of EarthServer-2, both server-side (rasdaman) and client-side (NASA WebWorldWind, python) are rather agnostic with respect to additional or different research priorities.

The communities linked to the various service partners (Ocean, Climate, Weather, Earth and Planetary Science) have been kept involved and engaged throughout the development of the project between the first and second milestone, addressing each of them at topical or general scientific venues, such as INSPIRE (upcoming workshop) and EGU dedicated Splinter Sessions.

====================================

# EU added value

EarhtServer-2 fosters scientific use and exploitation of European Remote Sensing data, as well as continent-scale or local Weather and Climate datasets.

EarthServer-2 technology providers and partners are working with several European major players. Services derived from EarthServer-1 are operational at ESA. Sentinel data are being integrated into EarthServer-2 services (e.g. Marine Science Data Service, hosted by Plymouth Marine Laboratories).

Altogether, EarthServer-2 is maintaining and extending the lead in Big Earth Data services established in the highly successful EarthServer-1 project. Being already supported by ESA, rasdaman will form an enabling building block for Copernicus / Sentinel.

Total votes: 1
Nicolas M. Thiéry's picture
Nicolas M. Thiéry,
05/10/2016 12:54

Foreword: OpenDreamKit (2015-2019) does not build e-infrastructure by
itself, but rather boosts the existing ecosystem of open source
software to make it easy to build powerful and flexible Virtual
Research Environments for mathematics on top of them and existing
e-infrastructure. This ecosystem include computational components
(GAP, Linbox, Pari, Sage, Singular ...), data bases (OEIS),
interactive computing environments (Jupyter), collaborative workspaces
(SageMathCloud, JupyterHub).

We are actively collaborating with existing VRE instances
(cloud.sagemath.org, ...) and e-infrastructure providers (EGI, ...) to
deploy new ones.

Relevance.

Given that OpenDreamKit started in 2015, we don't yet have much
relevant KPI's to assess its direct impact. To measure the target
audience to which we have already delivered many new features, let us
just mention that SageMathCloud is hosting hundreds of thousands of
users and collaborative projects.

Effectiveness.

This item is relatively irrelevant, as OpenDreamKit's contributions
impact as much e-infrastructures deployed in Europe and elsewhere.

Efficiency.

By nature, each and every component of OpenDreamKit is already in
active use in computational mathematics by a wide community (tens of
thousands of users) which is directly impacted by all our
improvements. By the end of the project, we expect that the new VRE
instances deployed will collectively have a number of users similar to
e.g. the original US-based SageMathCloud instance.

Coherence.

By nature, OpenDreamKit is an international endeavor promoting
software reuse and composability across disciplines and
institutions. For example ODK already enabled using several of the
computational components within the interactive computing environment
Jupyter, thus fostering Jupyter as a unified user interface for maths
and beyond, contributing to lowering the barrier across pure and
applied maths, and making the computational components more
sustainable by outsourcing the development of their user interface.

OpenDreamKit is also at the forefront of open science. Its
participants have not only been long time promoters of open data, open
software and open publications, some for decades, but they are
exploring novel approaches like open proposal writing and project
management.

EU added value.

The ecosystem of open source software has been traditionally strong in
Europe: many of the key components originated in Europe. The Sage and
Jupyter projects, both born in the US now have developers community of
similar strengths in the US and Europe. ODK further boosts European
leadership in this field and strengthen its role in the governance.

Total votes: 0
Natalia MANOLA's picture
Natalia MANOLA,
05/10/2016 11:09

1. RELEVANCE
(numbers in parentheses indicate the increase from January 2015)

Content
- 17,4 mi publications (85%) from 750 validated data providers (32%) (repositories, aggregators, OA journals which outreach to 6K original data sources)
- 350K publications (161%) are linked to funding schemes from 6 funders (200%)
- 28K data items linked to publications (400%), of which 3.5K are linked to EC funding (22%)
- Zenodo has 36K publications (485%), 2.3K supplementary material (586%), 2.5K datasets, 11K software items (266%) and is used by 735 communities (146%) by researchers from all around the world

Usage data
- ~800,000 visitors (80% unique) will visit OpenAIRE in 2016, a 130% increase from 2015. Users are from all around the world (55% from Europe) with 1,300,000 pageviews.
- OpenAIRE’s APIs show an average of 200 unique daily hits (bulk downloads of data). In the first nine months of 2016 we have had 46K visitors (IPs) totaling 6.2 mi API calls.

Social network outreach
- 5.5 K twitter followers (70%) with 1.7 mi impressions, an active Facebook community of 1,125 members (88%), a LinkedIn community of 385 members (110%)
- Vimeo: Over 100 videos, 10.5K plays our videos of webinars, workshops (79%)
- SlideShare: 120K views (300%)

Support and training
- In 2015 only the OpenAIRE network (National Open Access Desks) contacted 9,285 EC projects, 458 repositories, and 603 Journals to encourage them to comply with EC OA policies and OpenAIRE Guidelines. Representatives of OpenAIRE attended more than 388 events, published 79 articles on Open Science topics and handled 938 direct enquiries from researchers, project coordinators, repository managers and others.
- OpenAIRE’s regular webinars have been attended by more than 1200 people so far.
- OpenAIRE’s H2020 factsheets and guides have been downloaded 13K times in 2016.

2. EEFECTIVENESS
OpenAIRE is an acknowledged world-leader amongst other Open Science aggregation and implementation initiatives. Comparable e-Infrastructures are:

- US-SHARE (https://share.osf.io) is an initiative by the American Research Libraries Association. It collects “research events” (someone has published something) for all types of research artefacts, but does not link to funding provenance. It is a rather technical effort without much focus on open access activities. It has no human infrastructure comparable to OpenAIRE’s NOAD network.

- REDCLARA’s La Referencia is the latin America repository network. It follows an organization model similar to OpenAIRE’s. Its portal (http://www.lareferencia.info/vufind/) aggregates IRs from 8 nations with 750 K articles and 600K theses. La Referencia is an OpenAIRE partner, and has adopted the OpenAIRE Interoperability guidelines and used OpenAIRE’s validator service. Pending plans include a) the ingestion of LaReferencia’s content in OpenAIRE for the operation of OpenAIRE’s advanced services on a more global content and, b) technology transfer from OpenAIRE.

- In China the Chinese academy of Sciences has developed the Institutional Repository Grid (http://www.irgrid.ac.cn) which has aggregated about 700 K publications from the production of national research organizations. It mainly focuses on OA publications, and does not provide linking to other research entities.

- The National Institute for Informatics in Japan has developed JAIRO (http://ju.nii.ac.jp/en/) an infrastructure for IRs with a 2.4 mi OA publications (all harvested in OpenAIRE). There are plans to connect these publications with funding and data, with possible assitance from OpenAIRE. The Japanese Science & Technology Agency (JST) has announced a pilot with CHOR Inc (http://www.chorusaccess.org/announcing-chor-pilot-project-japan-science-technology-agency-jst/) to connect Japan’s publications to funding.

- Australia has not yet developed a publication a repository network. OpenAIRE has carried out a pilot with ANDS to identify publications funded by AU’s funders, which are subsequently linked to ANDS data services.

- The ICSU-WDS data portal (https://www.icsu-wds.org/services/data-portal) is a prototype discovery system that connects WDS’s 70 data repositories. OpenAIRE is currently running a pilot with WDS to provide the technical backend services for a more stable (production quality), more contextualized discovery service.

3. EFFICIENCY
OpenAIRE has been in 24/7 operation since December 2010. As the Open Science agenda has progressed, so OpenAIRE has continuously evolved through each project phase to incorporate new content and content types ( from publications, to data, and now software and other research artefacts). New services (both frontend, backend and community middleware) are continually added and used. Other than support to OA to publications and data, OpenAIRE invests in exploring new models of (open) peer review, new publishing models at the institution level, new metrics for impact measurement, and new tools/frameworks for data privacy. As the latter aim towards shifting researcher practices they have a longer term exploitation horizon.

OpenAIRE aspires to change the scholarly communication landscape, enabling Open Science at all possible levels of the research lifecycle. At the publishing level OpenAIRE, with its support for institutional repositories, is in tension with traditional (subscription) publishing, which is mainly dominated by commercial publishers. In supporting the Open Access/Open Science agenda through its diverse research, development, training and support activities, however, OpenAIRE fosters the movement of the private sector in scientific communication to new, sustainable income sources as providers of novel publishing services (metrics, evaluation, collaboration, APC-publishing). Moreover,OpenAIRE fosters growth and innovation in the private sector by unlocking and enabling new levels of scientific access for industry. It hence attracts SMEs who use OpenAIRE’s scientific content (openly available via CC BY) to develop innovative services for: extracting new knowledge through text and data mining, connecting researchers, connecting industry with research, analysing and evaluating research, etc.

OpenAIRE is a horizontal e-Infrastructure addressing scholarly communication in a discipline agnostic manner. Recent requirements from research communities (both RIs and less established ones) show a clear interest in using OpenAIRE’s services adapted and configured to their specific requirements. This support is planned via the OpenAIRE-Connect project via the EINFRA-22 call.

4. COHERENCE
OpenAIRE exists to foster the social and technical links to enable Open Science in Europe and beyond. It is embedded in a global network of repository networks and an exemplar for other regions in the world, placing Europe at the forefront of Open Science developments.

Global knowledge sharing requires interoperability and commonly agreed standards across institutions, countries and regions. OpenAIRE is a key player in the “Aligning repositories worldwide” initiative, stimulated and operated by the international Confederation of Open Access Repositories, COAR with representatives from networks in China, Japan, Australia, North-America, Canada, Latin America and South Africa. On the agenda are common data standards, access policies, exposure of data to other regions as well as concrete technology transfer.

In addition to the horizontal jurisdiction, global disciplinary regional networks (e.g., Global network on Agriculture) have expressed interest in the OpenAIRE operation model (organizational and technical),as they have identified complementarities both in services and content areas. They clearly see the potential for synergies and shared resources with OpenAIRE as a step towards the sustainability of their global network.

OpenAIRE, under the RDA umbrella and in collaboration with WDS, ANDS, Elsevier, Pangaea, etc., has developed the Data Literature Interlinking service (https://dliservice.research-infrastructures.eu) which maintains and resolves links between scholarly literature and data. Furthermore, OpenAIRE is a founding member of Scholix (http://www.scholix.org) an initiative for a high level interoperability framework for exchanging information from similar services.

5. EU ADDED VALUE
OpenAIRE adds value at the EU on multiple levels:

Policy
- Helps to formulate and align Open Access (OA) and Open Science (OS) policies in EU Member states and associate members. A good number of OpenAIRE’s National Open Access Desks actively participate in the national policy formulation and implementation (e.g., Austria, Portugal, France).

- Provides extensive training and support for OA and OS at the national and institutional level (2016 marked an attendance of more than 1400 people in our webinars). Provides support at EC’s Project Officers.

Interoperability
- Has created a community of practice of institutional data providers via the compatibility to OpenAIRE’s guidelines. Currently outreaching to CRIS systems.

Services
- OpenAIRE provides an integrated discovery service (publications, data, funding linked to their provenance) with an increasing user base: projected 800K visitors in 2016 and 1.4 mi pageviews. OpenAIRE is indexed by major services: worldwidescience.org from US DOE, and library services EBSCO and ExLibris.

- Through its comprehensive APIs OpenAIRE is becoming the service that distributes funding information (to the project level) from affiliated funders to repositories and journals. With its LOD APIs, OpenAIRE becomes the LOD gateway and links the scientific domain to others, e.g., Public Sector Information, Open Educational Resources, DBPedia.

- OpenAIRE’s collaboration with CERN has produced Zenodo, a world trusted repository for literature, datasets, software and auxiliary services, with an increasing user base.

- OpenAIRE’s collaboration in RDA groups has resulted in the Data Literature Integration prototype service (https://dliservice.research-infrastructures.eu) which is expected to be one of the global services for data-literature and data-data resolving mechanisms.

- OpenAIRE is developing an generic anonymization service/tool aiming to lift barriers due to data privacy and assist researchers to publish their data sets more freely.

- Through the FP7 post grant pilot, OpenAIRE has built a web/cloud service for processing the APCs, which is a prototype for a (cloud) service to be potentially used to process and monitor APCs at the EC or the institutional library level.

- OpenAIRE provides technology transfer (accompanied by support) and its techncology is used in setting up and maintaining national aggregators: Argentina, Spain, Poland, Turkey (pending).

Research Information
- Helps the EC identify its research output (195K publications identified for FP7 and 1.5K in H2020). Has assisted in FP7 ex-post evaluations with OpenAIRE’s data and through the provision of advanced research analytic services. Provides semi-automated reporting to EC’s participant portal for H2020 recipients.

- Reaches out to other EU funders (e.g., FCT - Portugal, NWO - Netherlands, WT - UK, SFI - Ireland, MSES - Croatia) for a pan-European research monitoring system. Works with AU and US funder databases for an international cross-cutting research information.

International leadership
- OpenAIRE has placed EU in the forefront of the international Open Science developments.

Total votes: 1
damien alline's picture
damien alline,
05/10/2016 09:48

TANDEM (May 2015-April 2017) aims at promoting e-infrastructures to donors and decision makers, and supporting WACREN to integrate the EC-funded AFRICACONNECT2 project.

1. Relevance.

TANDEM is focused on advocacy to convince governments and donors to invest on e-infrastructures in West and Central Africa, especially on connectivity in order to join the AFRICACONNECT2 project. Before TANDEM, no country in West and Central Africa formally committed to contribute to AfricaConnect2. Todate, 2 countries signed agreements with WACREN to participate in the project (Togo, Mali). WACREN and the TANDEM project are highly confident that Côte d’ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria will do the same in the coming months. The financial leverage of TANDEM is very high.

2. Effectiveness.

West and Central Africa is at the very beginning of the development of e-infrastructures. According to the GEANT Compendium dated from 2015 (https://compendium.geant.org/compendium-2015.pdf), there are no National Research and Education Network (NREN) known to be operational in West and Central Africa. In other words, there is no operational connectivity between universities and research centers. In this context it is difficult to benchmark with other regions in the world that are all connected.

3. Efficiency.

Knowing the context (refer answer to question 3), TANDEM focuses mainly on connectivity in order to give access countries to the Research and Education global network. Taking the most advanced countries in terms of NREN in the region, Côte d’Ivoire has an international available bandwidth out of the NREN of about 100Mbps, Senegal and Nigeria 300 Mbps each.

4. Coherence.

By convincing donors to support Côte d’Ivoire to participate to AfricaConnect2, TANDEM will allow connecting the second most powerful high performance computer in Africa to GEANT. More globally, TANDEM by focusing on connectivity is at the root of the e-infrastructures. Without connectivity between universities and research centers, there cannot be scientific e-infrastructures.

5. EU added value.

TANDEM does not build e-infrastructures but contributes to make possible the participation of West and Central African countries in the AfricaConnect2 project. By making this feasible for Côte Ivoire as an example, the second most important computing facility in Africa will be connected to GEANT. De facto, scientific international collaboration on crucial issues like climate change will be boosted.
By promoting WACREN-GEANT connection for African and European scientific communities, TANDEM will foster collaboration between European and African researchers.

Total votes: 1
Tiziana Ferrari's picture
Tiziana Ferrari,
07/10/2016 16:36

1 Relevance

Cloud and Storage service capacity federated in EGI have been growing exponentially during the last years with a relative yearly increase of +25% yearly for both Compute and Storage services. In the last 12 months the utilization of compute services increased by +26%.
Compute and Storage capacity KPIs (2016 QR3)
• 770,000 HTC cores (+26% yearly increase)
• 6,646 Cloud cores (in production since May 2014)
• 285 PB of Online storage (+12% yearly increase)
• 281 PB of Archive storage (+42% yearly increase)

Users
• EGI serves an international user community with researchers from all regions of the globe. The active registered users are estimated to be 48,000 in 2016 QR3 (+26% yearly increase).

2 Effectiveness

EGI is by far the largest multidisciplinary High Throughput Compute federation in the world, comprising more than 300 data centres and 770,000 computing cores across 56 countries. The infrastructure is operated locally primarily at universities and research laboratories in Europe but also in Africa and Arabia, the Asia Pacific region, North and South America. The purpose is to be part of an open system of interoperable e-Infrastructure through cooperation agreements.
• USA. The largest distributed HTC infrastructure in the US is the NSF-funded Open Science Grid (OSG, https://www.opensciencegrid.org/), and it includes 100 distributed centres. EGI utilization is approximately twice the utilization reported by OSC. XSEDE, the collaborative federated HPC infrastructure for researchers in the US, federates access to 214,000 cores (2016 QR3, https://portal.xsede.org/resource-monitor).
• Japan. EGI federates two High Throughput Compute centres in Japan for High Energy Physics: the data centre of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba and the LHC data centre in Tokyo. The overall approximate storage provided in 2016 to research projects by the Japanese High Performance Compute Infrastructure (HPCI, http://www.hpci-office.jp/pages/e_h28_boshu_hpci_resource) amounts to 45 PB.

EGI seeks for cooperation and integration with e-Infrastructures in the word to ensure an integrated service catalogue for international research collaborations. EGI has established service exchange programs with e-Infrastructures in various regions of the world to ensure data processing and advanced computing are accessible to researchers regardless of their country of origin.

Utilization KPIs (2016 QR3)
• HT Compute:
Last 6 months (2016 QR3): 1,640 Billion CPU hour
Last 12 months (2016 QR3): 2.6 Billion CPU hours, +26% yearly increase (the EGI volume is double the amount reported by Open Science Grid in the US)
Since January 2010: 11 Billion CPU hours
• HT Compute: 1.7 Million jobs/day on average (last 12 months)
• Cloud Compute: 256,000 instantiated VMs (last 12 months)

The average CPU efficiency of data processing in EGI amounts to 92% (yearly average), where efficiency measures how effectively CPU resources have been used during the execution time of a job.

EGI supports research performing private organizations through a dedicated programme: https://www.egi.eu/business which was launched in 2015 aiming at:
• Research performing companies that benefit from access to compute, storage and research data services; EGI provides computing capacity to test workflows, models, and applications that will be part of a future advanced ICT product or service with dedicated support and consultancy. An MoU has been established with the UberCloud marketplace and CloudSME.
• Platform integrators: EGI supports the reuse of open research data sets, tools and applications for product or service development, and participates in the co-design new products and services. Two MoUs are in place involving Terradue (operator and integrator of the ESA geohazards and hydrology ESA exploitation platform) and CloudSME (provider of SaaS services for engineering and manufacturing).
• Providers of Infrastructure as a Service: commercial cloud compute and storage services can be integrated in a hybrid publicly funded/commercial federation. To date the EGI federation includes one commercial cloud SME located in UK (100%IT).
The outcome of the programme in the Earth Observation sector after a year of activities is 4 SMEs who successfully implemented a use case involving EGI services.
EGI is member of the Big Data Value Association (BDVA). EGI has recently applied to receive an i-Space certification from BDVA: i-Spaces are the main elements of Big Data Value PPP to assure that innovations and research on BDV technologies and novel BDV applications will be quickly tested, piloted and exploited. i-Spaces are Trusted Data Incubators targeted to accelerate take up of data driven innovation in commercial sectors as well as in nonprofit sectors.

EGI is multidisciplinary and addresses all science disciplines according to the national research priorities. With Compute, Storage and Data Management services it supports 14 fully integrated Research Infrastructures and communities: the LHC - Large Hadron Collider, the Pierre Auger Observatory studying ultra-high energy cosmic rays, WeNMR for Structural Biology, Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research/BBMRI-NL, IceCube Neutrino Observatory, CTA - Cherenkov Telescope Array, The next generation neutrino telescope KM3NeT, Low-Frequency Array/LOFAR, The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope/LSST, the ZEUS detector, H.E.S.S. - The High Energy Stereoscopic System, the Virgo detector for gravitational waves, ELI-NP Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics, and LifeWatch - European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem research. In total EGI supports about 200 running international projects and research collaborations. In addition to this, EGI is running a network of competence centres for service co-design in collaboration with BBMRI, EISCAT-3D (sky observation), DARIAH (art and humanities), ELIXIR (life sciences), and EPOS (solid earth science).

4 Coherence
To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?
EGI is part of an open international system of research infrastructures through a number of collaborations involving to following regions:
• Africa and Arabia (10 data centres): the collaboration is represented by the Meraka Institute in South Africa – itself an operating unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) – which hosts the South African Initiative for Cyberinfrastructure (NICI).
• Asia-Pacific (26 data centres): the collaboration is represented by the Asia Pacific Grid Initiative is coordinated by Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC).
• China (2 data centres): the collaboration is represented by Institute of High Energy Physics - Chinese Academy of Sciences – IHEP.
• Canada (9 data centres): the collaboration is represented by Compute Canada in partnership with regional organizations ACENET, Calcul Québec, Compute Ontario and WestGrid.
• Latin America (9 data centres): the collaboration is represented by the Universida de Federal do Rio de Janeiro representing the GISELA Consortium that aims at ensuring the long-term sustainability of the European – Latin American (EU-LA) e-Infrastructure.
• North America: the collaboration is represented by the Open Science Grid
• Ukraine (19 data centres): the collaboration is represented by Basic Coordination Centre performs functions of National Operations Centre of High-Throughput Compute services at the technical and operational level of the Ukrainian National Grid project.

EGI is an international collaboration that federates the digital capabilities, resources and expertise of national and international research communities in Europe and worldwide. Our main goal is to empower researchers from all disciplines to collaborate and to carry out data- and compute-intensive science and innovation. The mission of EGI is to create and deliver open solutions for science and research infrastructures by federating digital capabilities, resources and expertise between communities and across national boundaries.
For its services EGI develops, deploys and supports open source software, and allows the sharing of scientific applications in the form of cloud virtual appliances. EGI also contributes to the definition and implementation of open cloud standards. EGI has a service-oriented approach in which research communities are not only consumers but also providers of innovation and services for community-specific capabilities in one integrated catalogue. Co-design is supported through Competence Centres involving Research Infrastructures and research communities that contribute to the development of human networks of experts, services providers and technology providers.

5 EU Added Value
• EGI federates national e-Infrastructures and resources from international research organizations opening access to international research-performing organizations and collaborations, and by doing so it supports the development of the European Research Area allowing cross-border access to national digital services.
• EGI supports the Open Science Commons, an overarching policy designed to overcome the barriers preventing the implementation of the ERA. It seeks to encompass all the elements required for a functioning ERA: research data, scientific instrumentation (such as the Large Hadron Collider or Square Kilometre Array), and ICT services (connectivity, computing, platforms and research-specific services such as portals, and knowledge). This concept builds on the principles of Open Science (or) Science 2.0 supported by the European Commission and others and also the commons principle for management of shared resources. EGI is seeking other e-Infrastructures, research infrastructures and stakeholders from the digital research community to collaborate in constructing the Open Science Commons. EGI implements the Commons by federating community infrastructures and by allowing the sharing of scientific applications in a federated research cloud.
• EGI contributes to digital innovation by providing access to the digital capabilities or resources available to the research sector for the exploitation of commercially viable research data, and to support testing and experimentation. The most advanced collaborations are those involving industry and SMEs doing business through the exploitation of Earth Observation data including Copernicus data. EGI provides data management services that allow the distributed hosting and processing of Copernicus data.

Total votes: 1
Anna Montras's picture
Anna Montras,
30/09/2016 14:05

1. e-INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT

Multi-scale complex Genomics (MuG) - http://www.multiscalegenomics.eu/

2. RELEVANCE

The MuG VRE infrastructure as such is still on its early stage of development and testing, with months of integration still ahead until a complete service can be offered to users, traffic can be registered and representative statistics are obtained. An initial version of the MuG VRE (http://www.multiscalegenomics.eu/MuGVRE/) is available online since September 2016. This first prototype provides a cloud-based environment able to perform a series of operations packed as virtual machines, and several interfaces of access, including specific web portals, and programmatic access. During the first weeks of being online, the VRE webpage has received close to 20 unique visitors.

An indirect measure of the impact and potential growth over time can be found in the usage statistics of the different analysis tools, databases or related platforms that are progressively being integrated and tailored to 3D-genomics community user-needs in the MuG VRE portal.

Among the tools and services we would like to highlight:

*NAFlex is a web tool for Nucleic Acid flexibility study. It has an average traffic of 2.200 users/year.
*MDWeb (Molecular Dynamics web-based simulation platform): online since March 2014, the average traffic on this platform is of 6,700 unique visitors /year.
*BigNASim, a database and analysis portal for nucleic acids simulation data, already has over 550 users since its publication in late 2015.
*NucleR, a package for non-parametric nucleosome positioning determination receives an average of 2,800 downloads per year.
*TADbit is a computational package for the analysis of 3C-based experimental data. Its Github repository registers an average of 950 unique visitors per year.
*TADkit is a 3D genome visualization tool that creates interactive 3D representations of chromatin conformations modeled from 3C-based interaction matrices. The download site registers ~480 unique visitors yearly.

3. EFFECTIVENESS

According to the 2016 EC working document “Implementation of the Action Plan for the European HPC strategy”, the bio-sciences application sector accounted for ~11% of the total EU spending in HPC resources in 2014. An increasing investment in HPC resources is helping Europe slowly narrow the gap with the USA, China and Japan as provider of high-end supercomputing resources. This provides a favourable context for an e-infrastructure like MuG to become well positioned with respect to competing initiatives worldwide.

While MuG is pioneering the initiative to tackle the problems faced by the 3D genomics community in a holistic way, USA recently launched an ambitious initiative to support collaborative research related to understanding the 3D organization and dynamics of DNA in the cell nucleus. In late 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the 4D Nucleome Program, under which more than $120M over 5 years have been granted to multidisciplinary teams of researchers located in 24 institutions across the country that are involved at different levels, from basic research to organization and infrastructure. It is under this program that an infrastructure with several aspects in common with MuG is being developed: aprox. $20M will be devoted to the development of the “Organizational Hub and Web Portal for the 4D Nucleome Network” (4DN Portal) and $2.5M/year to the “4D Nucleome Network Data Coordination and Integration Center”.

On the other hand, Japan and China fall behind in the field of 3D genomics and we are not aware of similar funded efforts to build a similar e-infrastructure in the short term. In Japan there have been preliminary efforts from the scientific community to launch an initiative to establish an “International Nucleome consortium” but no infrastructure development is foreseen.

4. EFFICIENCY

The proven usage level of individual applications being integrated in the VRE together with results of research community/market analysis give as a result a very positive forecast for the exploitation possibilities of the services offered by the multiscale genomics VRE.

DNA structural biology, epigenetics and the control of gene expression are at the crossroads of many traditional scientific disciplines. The functions of DNA are modulated structure-wise at many different levels, calling for a multiscale approach as the most sensible way of tackling DNA structural biology questions. A complete picture of how DNA is regulated along the cell cycle and new therapeutic opportunities deriving from it can only emerge by building IT structures that enable zooming in and out among the different levels and inter-relating them appropriately.

The field of epigenetics has reached maturity over the last few years, with many Biotech companies using last-generation data from these infrastructures to uncover pathological mechanisms and to validate new therapeutic strategies. Central to this recent push in the field has also been the involvement of pre-competitive groups such as the Structural Genomics Consortium, which has been unveiling the structures of many DNA-regulatory enzymes and structural proteins. A host of companies have emerged that specialize exclusively on capitalizing this last wave of epigenetics knowledge, such as Constellation, Epizyme, Epitherapeutics, Cellzome or Chroma Therapeutics. These companies have engaged in drug discovery programs targeting the most prominent families of epigenetic proteins and enzymes, among them histone deacetylases, histone methyltransferases and histone demethylases. A series of multi-million dollar agreements have been signed between them and big pharma companies, among the most prominent: Constellation-Genentech, Epizyme-GlaxoSmithKline, Epitherapeutics-Abbott and Oryzon Genomics-Roche. Although most of the deals are forged for oncology indications, new therapeutic applications in inflammatory and CNS diseases are also cropping up.

It is expected that new initiatives at the interface of basic research and applied pharmacology in the epigenetics field will uncover new therapeutic opportunities in a range of diseases with unmet medical need. The MuG e-infrastructure will undoubtedly contribute to this end.

5. COHERENCE

MuG is strongly related to other complementary initiatives at all levels. MuG is fully aligned with the ELIXIR , RDA (Research Data alliance), and GA4GH (Global Alliance for Genomics and Health) initiatives, which have strong positions on the support of open data access policies. Their recommendations will be the preferred vehicle to open our tools, and data to the genomics community. Collaboration with the BioExcel Center of Excellence has also been established, which shares a special interest in the field of atomistic simulations. The use of e-infrastructures is aligned with PRACE, through traditional HPC usage, to EGI where MuG computational infrastructure progressively derive software and analysis execution, and to EUDAT as a way to provide a stable data repository. Also MuG’s computational offer will be fully integrated in ELIXIR portfolio of data and services.

MuG partners aim at offering open access to all publications by depositing them in OpenAIRE-compliant repositories according to the required timings. As part of the open research data pilot, MuG has already delivered a first version of the Data Management Plan which will be updated accordingly throughout the project to ensure we comply with the FAIR principles.

6. EU ADDED VALUE

Genomics is one of the fastest evolving fields in biology. Due to its dependence on fast evolving and not standardized technology, the 3D genomics community is facing a significant fragmentation and disconnection, calling for integrated efforts to ensure these technical problems do not become a bottleneck for the progress in the field.

By providing a infrastructure adapted to this specific community, MuG aims to culminate the efforts of many existing initiatives across Europe that intend to harmonize methodology and data analysis by bringing together expert researchers.

MuG has the potential to make a difference on a wide range of stakeholders: researchers who will get the chance to work with data across scales and data sources from a single place in an optimal way, pharma companies or the public sector, interested in the processed information arising from MuG, or sequencing instrument vendors who will benefit from MuG tools for integrated analysis and visualization.

Total votes: 1
Ognjen Prnjat's picture
Ognjen Prnjat,
30/09/2016 11:40

1. e-infrastructure project. Indicate which H2020 e-infrastructure project you represent.
VI-SEEM
2. Relevance. Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc.
At the end of first 1/3 of the project the services are deployed and the first call for use is opened beginning of October 2016, and the results will be available in the next period.
3. Effectiveness. Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan.
This will be possible once results related to point 2 are available. However the objective of the project is not to compete with global powerhouses but rather provide for an inclusive environment for the under-resourced countries in EU and within the immediate neighbourhood (Western Balkans and ENP countries).
4. Efficiency. Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. Were things built and stand idle or are they used? You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area? Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?
The VRE services are now being developed according to a well-defined set of user requirements (carried out at start of project) and thus are envisaged to be heavily used/exploited. Three different scientific communities are to be served: in Life Sciences, Climatology, and digital Cultural Heritage. These three communities are to be catered for with a set of common e-Infrastructure services as well as domain-specific services. VI-SEEM aims to serve specific research domains in its geographical area of interest. This is done by deploying applications and therefore domain specific services, collecting and organizing domain specific datasets and providing optimized software for the specific scientific communities.
Facilitating open science in these fields certainly does not hamper business development.
5. Coherence. To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?
A subset of services provided within the e-Infrastructure is discipline-neutral, while some services are domain-specific focusing on Life Sciences, Climatology, and digital Cultural Heritage.
The infrastructure is international/global in the sense of being open to communities not just within EU (Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hungary, Romania, etc) but also non-member states from Western Balkans and European Neighbourhood - Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Israel, Jordan, Egypt. The regional catchment extends to Turkey, Azerbaijan and Lebanon.
VI-SEEM supports open science by providing access to open data sets, tools, codes and e-Infrastructure services. The e-Infrastructure users are also able to generate and make available open data via the VI-SEEM services. Such data will be available to the relevant communities worldwide strengthening the provision of open data and open research initiatives.
6. EU added value. Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?
- Catering for scientific communities from under-resourced EU members as well as Western Balkans and certain ENP countries.
- Lowering the barrier for such communities to have access to international class resources and services and thus making access to e-Infrastructures more open, catering also to the long tail of science.
- Bringing together scientists from multiple countries in Europe and beyond by providing them a collaborative Virtual Research Environment (VRE) that can stimulate further collaboration at the international level.
- Providing access to unified environment of HPC, Grid, Cloud, data services, discipline-specific services and data sets, workflows and codes through a single Virtual Research Environment.

Total votes: 1
Paul Ayris's picture
Paul Ayris,
29/09/2016 21:56

E-Infrastructure Projects: Questionnaire
• e-infrastructure project. Indicate which H2020 e-infrastructure project you represent.
LEARN (LEaders Activating Research Networks)
• Relevance. Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc.
LEARN will hold Workshops in all partner sites - UK, Austria, Finland, Catalan Region, and Chile inviting all stakeholders (librarians and IT specialists, researchers, research funders, policy and decision makers) to engage with the fundamentals of research data management (RDM). Attenders to date. London 83; Vienna: 55; Helsinki: 65
• Effectiveness. Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan
LEARN does not per se provide technical infrastructure. It is a support programme for those new to RDM. Levels of takeup of the RDM self-assessment tool LEARN has developed are reported under Efficiency.
• Efficiency. Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. Were things built and stand idle or are they used? You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area? Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?
A self-assessment survey, allowing users to evaluate their level of preparation for RDM, has been created. At the 31st May 2016, we received 118 valid answers from at least 24 countries. Answering to the country provenance is optional, therefore we could have received answers from other places. UK and Spain are the countries from which we received most answers. Besides Europe and Latin America, we also received answers from Australia and the USA.
• Coherence. To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?
LEARN has 3 main deliverables: a model RDM policy, with guidance on how to construct and implement one; a high level multilingual executive briefing on RDM issues; a Toolkit of Best Practice Case Studies in RDM implementation. The unifying purpose of these deliverables is to address all stakeholders in the RDM chain (researchers, librarians and IT specialists, research funders, policy and decision makers) and prepare them to tackle the challenges that RDM brings. LEARN is neutral as to the benefits of Open Data versus data which carries access restrictions. LEARN lists and shows the benefits of Open Data, but also acknowledges that some data cannot be open. 'As open as possible, as closed as necessary' neatly describes the LEARN approach. Therefore, LEARN does support European, indeed global, Open Access, Open Data and Open Science initiatives.
• EU added value. Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?
The LEARN project is a collaboration between 5 countries in 2 continents. Through the pooling of resources and activity, LEARN avoids needless duplication of effort in the Member States. It builds on work already undertaken in Europe - especially the LERU Roadmap for Research Data (http://www.leru.org/files/publications/AP14_LERU_Roadmap_for_Research_data_final.pdf) - and expands on this report.
The RDM Self-Assessment Tool is already identifying geographical areas which are under-prepared for the 'data delugue' and those which are not yet engaging with the issues. The outcomes of LEARN will therefore inform future EU policy and guidance on RDM and Open Science and help to direct future funding streams more accurately to target known needs across the Member States.
LEARN will also prove to be an essential building block for preparation to engage with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), where research data can be shared and made available for re-use by any European citizen wishing so to do.

Total votes: 1
Guenter Muehlberger's picture
Guenter Muehlberger,
29/09/2016 16:33

1. READ
2. Relevance
READ aims to set up a generic infrastructure to process, recognize and enrich archival documents with the means of technologies, such as Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), Keyword Spotting (KWS) and Information Extraction (IE). In order to serve our four main target groups (archives, humanities scholars, computer scientists and family historians) we have set up and are maintaining the service platform „Transkribus“ (http://transkribus.eu/) which brings this technology to the users.
More than 4000 people, most of them from the archives and humanities sector have already registered in the platform, downloaded our client software with which the server based services can be accessed. Thousands of documents have been uploaded.
In addition about 20 institutions have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the READ consortium indicating the relevance of our work for their collections and businesses and providing test data for research and development.
3. Effectiveness
READ represents cutting-edge research and is to our best knowledge the only public provider of Handwritten Text Recognition technology worldwide.
4. Efficiency
We are surprised about the interest of users all over the world and their willingness to contribute to the usage of the platform. It is obvious that our e-infrastructure does not harm private business development but foster the uptake of technology in the cultural heritage sector. It turns out that the idea of a public service platform seems to satisfy the needs of users.
5. Coherence
One of our most important aspects is to foster excellent research, namely in the fields of Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. For this purpose we have set several actions, mainly prepared publicly available datasets and organised research competitions in the most relevant conferences in the field in close cooperation with archives from all over Europe. But also at two other user groups, archives and digital humanities scholars, the coherence factor is strong, since researchers are directly working with Finnish, Italian, German, Norwegian, British or Spanish documents in the same way, with the same tools and the same data standards. READ is therefore a truly European platform.
6. EU added value
Research in Handwritten Text Recognition is a field where European groups and universities are strong and have set the scene for many years. With READ we will encourage more and especially young researchers from the computer science, but also from the Digital Humanities to work in this domain and to contribute to the advance of research.

Total votes: 1
Florencio Utreras's picture
Florencio Utreras,
29/09/2016 15:48

Relevance

1.MAGIC: http://www.magic-project.eu

2.Relevance

MAGIC aims at
1) Spreading the use of European standards such as eduroam for Global Wifi access, eduGAIN for AAI Federation, NRENnum for global dialing of SIP devices, in several regions of the World, namely: Africa, the Arab Countries, Central Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia.
2) Establish agreements for the adoption of an inter-operability standard for groupware in order to foster the development of cloud services that are group-aware, i.e., where user groups information can be used to access services across services worldwide.
3) To foster the use of applications provided by NRENs for the use of NRENs in other countries and regions, creating in this way a market for applications between NRENs of the World.

During the MAGIC Project we can report the following indicators after year 1 of work.

3.Effectivenes

eduroam has become a World standard for wifi-roaming in the academic sector, being already adopted in NorthAmerica and Asia. Hence the project is incorporating other World regions and making possible the use of this service really Worldwide.

The same can be said for eduGAIN that has been widely adopted in Europe and the US, hence it has become a Worldwide service that we are spreading across other regions.

4.Efficiency.

The infrastructures that we are fostering are becoming worldwide standards and its use is being increased very rapidly. See for example https://www.eduroam.org/where/ and https://technical.edugain.org/status.php

In the side of shared tools interacting in a unified platform, the MAGIC project is promoting the use of Colaboratorio, a social network tool integrating services commonly used for collaboration, such as webconferencing, wikis, large file transfer and others. During the project span, 4 new countries have adopted this tool to serve their communities and several others are working on its implementation. Also, the integration with groupware standards will allow the inter-operation of this tool with similar tools already in use in Europe, such as Sympa in France and others. The number of applications being integrated is growing and we foresee that the sharing of tools will become a common practice between NRENs in the coming future.

We don’t see any harm to private business, on the contrary, the adoption of some of this standard technologies by private Cloud providers would allow them to better serve the academic market and increase their participation in serving this special community.

The actual status of the infrastructure is not domain specific, nevertheless, specific applications for different scientific communities are being studied in order to integrate them with the groupware tools and hence provide better service to user groups (communities). This is not within the commitments of the project, but it should be worked in the near future.

5.Coherence.

This infrastructure is aimed at supporting global science and academia by facilitating roaming, access to services and global services to different user communities across the World. Our infrastructure is neutral since it provides tools for all disciplines and inter-operates with other similar platforms.
It certainly supports Open Science by enabling open worldwide collaboration in a secure environment where intellectual property and privacy are being respected.

6.EU added value.

This project promotes the use of European born technology in romaing, authentication, groupware and others

Total votes: 1
Namrata Kale's picture
Namrata Kale,
28/09/2016 15:21

PhenoMeNal: Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis

Relevance. Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc.

The PhenoMeNal Virtual Research Environment Portal (VRE Portal), gateway to all tools and workflows on offer, went live in August 2016. This initial, partly static version, is currently accessible at http://portal.phenomenal-h2020.eu/home. This first release includes dynamically parsed information from both our GitHub repositories and our EGI AppDB organisation for the App library, live access to functional test-drive VRE with the PhenoMeNal Galaxy installation, and access to real documentation through the decision-tree for local deployment.
PhenoMeNal Galaxy installation, our test-drive VRE, runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster of 3 nodes on the EBI EMBASSY Cloud (www.embassycloud.org, running OpenStack). Each machine (8 cores, 16GB RAM) runs a Kubernetes master container, a Kubernetes node container and the etcd node container on top of CoreOS. The Kubernetes cluster has access to a scalable GlusterFS shared file system, provided by 3 Ubuntu 16.04 VMs in the same tenancy.
Work is currently underway on finishing the automatic cloud deployment interfaces and functionality testing. We expect to have a live version of this running on the portal soon.
PhenoMeNal hosts a Jenkins continuous integration system at https://phenomenal-h2020.eu/jenkins/ and a docker registry to make containers publicly available for the research community. Currently we have 29 containers hosted on our docker registry at http://docker-registry.phenomenal-h2020.eu. Measure of the usage of the services provided by PhenoMeNal will be available after its first release scheduled for spring next year.

Effectiveness. Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan.

The PhenoMeNal project is believed to be a major advance beyond the current state-of-art in providing a novel infrastructure that covers common layers if the data analysis workflow, from the earliest point of data acquisition to the generation of scientific knowledge. The infrastructure is still under development and adheres to a rigorous testing procedure.

Efficiency. Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. Were things built and stand idle or are they used? You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area? Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?

The PhenoMeNal VRE has reached a stage where proof-of-concept integration between VMIs and containers is operational, and cover certain analysis workflows within the VRE . Work is still ongoing to increase the amount of tools integrated (wrapped) for Galaxy usage and tested within Kubernetes installation. PhenoMeNal infrastructure will provide statistical and computational solutions for researchers and SME’s.

Coherence. To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by providing services for open data and open science, etc.). Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?

PhenoMeNal supports syntactic data normalisation by delivering pre-processing tools to convert data from proprietary formats into standardised open formats – for instance, converting raw MS and NMR data files into the mzML or nmrML formats, respectively. All software and documentation developed are hosted in our GitHub organisation. In accordance with the H2020 pilot on open research data, data collections will be disseminated under a liberal open data license. The infrastrcuture interfaces with the open-access data repository MetaboLights (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights/) for data deposition and reuse. It is to be noted that, wherever privacy and ethical reasons prevent free data sharing, the issue will be handled in agreement with the Ethical Legal and Social principles. An initial version of Data Management Plan (D1.5.1) has been published in this context.

EU added value. Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?

The infrastructure will provide services to the European biomedical community by enabling computation and analysis. Currently PhenoMeNal is working closely with both Elixir and EGI. All of PhenoMeNal VMIs will be available through the EGI AppDB. Further on this collaboration, PhenoMeNal has decided to create a sub-group (category) belonging to the Elixir virtual organisation (VO) under EGI AppDB. This ensures closer collaboration with Elixir and EGI, as well as the ability to share some common code base. In future releases of the VRE and VRE Portal we will integrate with the EGI Federated Cloud for full feature integration, including VMcaster and VMcatcher capabilities.

Total votes: 1
Donatella Castelli's picture
Donatella Castelli,
05/10/2016 21:45

e-infrastructure project: BlueBRIDGE

The BlueBRIDGE project objective is to build and operate a number of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) (or Virtual Labs) serving needs of different multidisciplinary communities. These VREs are implemented by relying on an e-Infrastructure, named D4Science, that can exploit resources from multiple heterogeneous data, tools and computing third-party providers.  The answers provided to some of the questions below are given taking into account the impact that the provision of these new VREs is having on the D4Science Infrastructure.
 
Relevance:
Provide measures of the usage of the services provided by your e-infrastructure and improvement over time. For example, traffic growth on the networks, usage of supercomputing facilities etc.  

Currently BlueBRIDGE operates 30 VREs  - 8 additional VREs will be put in production by October 2016. Some of these VREs are addressed to large group of users, while others support the work of small teams whose outcomes, however, have a relevant impact on the society at large. For example, the publicly accessible BiodiversityLab and TabularDataLab VREs counts respectively 314 and 148 active users while the ICCAT BFT-E VRE, serving a specific team of experts of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, count 15 active users.
Overall the active users increased with a 65% growth factor in the last 6 months.
 
Effectiveness:
Provide benchmarks comparing your e-infrastructure against e-infrastructures in other scientific powerhouses such as USA, China and Japan.

D4Science and the BlueBRIDGE VREs are unique in the spectrum of capabilities offered. Almost the totality of the closest infrastructures aim to aggregate datasets from multiple providers and offer a homogeneous interface for retrieving and accessing them. D4Science exploits many of these aggregators (the majority of them acting at international level), in order to provide capabilities to its users. Notable examples are CMEMS (Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service) providing access to physical state, variability and dynamics of the ocean and marine ecosystems for the global ocean and the European regional seas; GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) providing integrated access to biodiversity data; and OSCAR (Ocean Surface Current Analyses Real-time) released from a NASA research project.
Only few of the existing data infrastructures support analytics. Usually, the set of analytics methods is fixed and it requires considerable development effort to be expanded. Moreover, these infrastructures do not combine in the same framework capabilities for collaboration and for supporting the entire data management lifecycle, e.g. from collection, to curation, integration, discovery, access, analytics, validation and publication, as instead D4Science and BlueBRIDGE do.

 
Efficiency: Provide measures of the levels of exploitation of your e-infrastructure. 

The BlueBRIDGE VREs are operated by the D4Science infrastructure. D4Science has a certified 99.815% availability and 99.964% reliability measured in the last year. The active users (users returning at least one time every 5 days) belonging to the supported communities are 1428 and they are spread in 44 countries including Italy, Greece, France, Denmark, Norway, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany (top 10 countries exploiting the VREs).
 
Were things built and stand idle or are they used? 
The services delivered through the VREs are continuously used. For example, considering only three of the VREs offered by BlueBRIDGE (BiodiversityLab, StalableDataMining, and Bionym) we can observe 6,300 processes per day in average (measured between 18 August and 9 September). Those VREs process spatial and temporal series with different models (the first two VREs) and taxonomic trees (the third) and the wall time per process can reach 9 minutes.
 
You’re your e-infrastructure assist or harm private business development in an area?
Facilitating the exploitation of infrastructure provided services by companies, especially SMEs, is one of the major objectives of the BlueBRIDGE project. Currently, there are two classes of SMEs exploiting the BlueBRIDGE capabilities.  The first class includes software companies exploiting the infrastructure capabilities for reducing the time and the cost to market their products. These make available services that are operated by the infrastructure and included in the infrastructure catalogue. These services can be accessed either thought the user interface of a specific VRE or through a portal operated by the company itself. The second class is composed by the companies that use the data and the services in the existing VREs to generate knowledge helping them to enhance their productivity and competitiveness. 
 
Some e-infrastructures are more domain specific than others – how are infrastructure needs of different sciences treated?  
 
The BlueBRIDGE underlying infrastructure, D4Science, offers generic capabilities for managing different data types, e.g. geospatial, statistical, textual (structured and non-structured), graph data,  and a set of analytics frameworks that can be extended and customized by integrating different methods. Moreover, it provides a Virtual Research Environment Builder facility that allows to dynamically create and deploy VREs. The creation simply requires selecting a subset of the datasets and service capabilities registered in the infrastructure catalogues and the specification of who is allowed to access the corresponding environment. The combination of all these mechanisms provides a high level of customization that addresses the needs of a wide range of different scientific communities.
 
Coherence: 
To what extent your e-infrastructure project supports other activities (e.g. internationalization by making infrastructures global, open access policies by proving services for open data and open science, etc.). 

By design the D4Science infrastructure implements an infrastructure ecosystem, i.e. it consumes and make available services to other infrastructures. Given the scope addressed by the BlueBRIDGE project many of these user and provider infrastructures are international. International is also its user based as indicated by the numbers reported above in the Efficiency section.

BlueBRIDGE largely contribute to Open Science through its mechanisms and addressed focus.
Data and software aggregated by BlueBRIDGE have to comply with the policies established by the providers of these resources. As currently the majority of the BlueBRIDGE data providers are organizations that support open access by mandate, a large part of the information space aggregated by BlueBRIDGE is open access. 

Many of the infrastructural services process data and return new information products. The owner of these products can maintain them in her own private workspace, can shared them either within a group or publicly.  Shared products can be used in any other VREs, whatever is the purpose and the domain served by these VREs.  
Each time a new product is generated mechanisms are put in place to track provenance information. This information, coupled with the possibility of maintaining in the working area all the elements used to produce the new product, i.e. datasets, software, applied parameters, and the possibility of exploiting the infrastructure for the required processing offer a very powerful instrument for the repeatability and reproducibility of science.

Do you consider your e-infrastructure neutral with respect to other research priorities?
As explained in the section “Efficiency”, a large part of the BlueBRIDGE underlying services have been designed to be able to work in different contexts. Other domains served by D4Science infrastructure are humanities, social science, marine biodiversity and geothermal science. Overall D4Science operates 59 VREs in these different domains and serve 2968 active users.
 
EU added value: 
Could you provide examples about how your e-infrastructure adds value at EU level?

BlueBRIDGE VREs contribute to relevant issues raised by H2020 Blue Growth Societal Challenge. They facilitate: (a) the research and decision making processes, e.g. by helping the retrieval, access and production of better quality fisheries stock assessments or by automatically detecting aquaculture structures using remote sensing data; and (b) the innovation and growth of both IT SMEs operating on big data and other SMEs that by exploiting the outcomes of big data analytics can enhance their production and competitiveness.

Total votes: 2