IMarine Liaisons

This page realizes D2.5; Reports on interactions with FP7 projects and other R&D national/international programmes on inter-project coordination and collaboration.

It is due at Month 15 aka January 2013 Should we revise this intro and make it independent of deliverable and deadlines? We have the document which links this page with the deliverable

For each collaboration the following information are reported:

1. A description of the Project/Initiative and its Objectives;
2. The description of the Community of PracticeA term coined to capture an "activity system" that includes individuals who are united in action and in the meaning that "action" has for them and for the larger collective. The communities of practice are "virtual", ''i.e.'', they are not formal structures, such as departments or project teams. Instead, these communities exist in the minds of their members, are glued together by the connections they have with each other, as well as by their specific shared problems or areas of interest. The generation of knowledge in communities of practice occurs when people participate in problem solving and share the knowledge necessary to solve the problems. served/involved;
3. A description of the established collaboration agreement;
4. The detailed plan and dates, if this is available.

The initiatives are then summarized in an overview table.

Inter project collaboration

Collaboration plan

The plan at the start of the project for collaboration is described in the third iMarine objective:

"(iii) the extension, adaptation and deployment of a rich set of software components that implement these services. Instrumental in the activities of iMarine will be the establishment of an active set of collaborations with other international initiatives. The aim will be to reuse and render interoperable existing policies, technologies, and e-infrastructures. By leveraging on these collaborations and by taking advantage of additional funding that these organizations invest in the project, the number of available resources brought into play will be maximized."

Collaboration opportunities that were already identified at project inception were with EGI, ERINA+, EUBrazilOpenBio, VLIZ, and NEAFC. Most of these collaboration are now either established or planned, with the understanding that the preparation of such a collaboration requires a preparation of the technical and human infrastructure, and the collaboration may not have been actuated as of the time of preparation of this document.

New opportunities for collaboration

Many collaboration opportunities emerged during P1 of the project, and this dynamic list is expected to grow substantially towards project completion. Not all opportunities are listed here, but only those where a collaboration or coordination action was discussed at WP level or above. In addition, some collaborations were discussed but not pursued due to non-disclosure agreements, software incompatibilities, or other blocking issues. Only real "prospects" are included.

The collaboration opportunities and the co-ordination thereof collected here summarize the effort. Where the collaboration has resulted in concrete activities, these are described elsewhere. This deliverable documents the collaboration at high-level only.

Each Collaboration is first described by the names, the entities involved, the goal and objectives, and some activities. A brief overview of the activity table is given, and also the intended type of collaboration is mentioned. These types go from a loose, consumption like collaboration, to a full sharing of project resource development. In a short overview as presented in this page, a detailed classification of collaboration types is not feasible, and they have to be summarized as follwos:

1. Data sharing; exchange data programmatically between infrastructures;
2. VREVirtual Research Environment. Exploitation; deliver a VREVirtual Research Environment. to a new community;
3. Software development; share the development of services between frameworks;
4. Software integration; convert existing code to execute on to e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large., e.g. in gCube;
5. Co-development; write software and share code to execute on the e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large..

Ultimately, also the status of the collaboration is activity is reported, which can be only one of :

1. Prospect; The iMarene collaboration opportunity has been presented;
2. Aborted; The collaboration was not achieved;
3. On-hold; The activities are on hold, pending
4. Planning; The collaboration plan is being drafted;
5. Development; the collaboration resources are being developed for implementation;
6. Validation; the delivered components (or resource, or the exploitation of existing resources) is being validated by collaboration partners;
7. Completed; the collaboration is active.

Progress table

iMarine co-ordination and collaboration

Collaboration	Planned / New	Last activity	Type	Status
VLIZ	Planned	01.2013	Data sharing	Development
EMI	Planned	02.2012	Software integration	Completed
ERINA	Planned	02.2012	Software integration	Completed
EUOpenBio	Planned	01.2013	Software integration	Development
EMODNet	New	01.2013	Data sharing	Development
FishFinder	New	12.2012	VREVirtual Research Environment. Exploitation	Completed
VocBench	New	01.2013	Software	Development
Tuna Atlas	Planned	01.2013	Data sharing	Validation
Data.fao.org	New	01.2013	Data sharing	Development
Eurostat	Planned	10.2012	Data sharing	Completed
VME-DB	New	10.2012	VREVirtual Research Environment.	Planning
ABNJ	New	10.2012	Data sharing	Prospect
GBIF	New	10.2012	Data sharing	Completed
Lifewatch	Planned	10.2012	Data sharing	Development
GOLD	New	12.2012	Data sharing	Prospect
BestTuna	New	01.2013	VREVirtual Research Environment.	Prospect

Inter-projects Coordination

The inter-projects activities may not only result in collaboration (i.e. partaking in a shared activity), but can also result in a co-ordination effort. This can manifest itself in bundling resources to approach external communities, reduce overlap in development effort by aligning activities, and avoid duplication of effort by building on components from other projects. This is mainly an activity of negotiating and information exchange.

Another aspect of inter-project coordination is the planning and scheduling of collaboration activities. This is not detailed for each individual case, rather an approach was adopted where roles were distributed between the iMarine Board, the Steering Board, and the wider EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.. Where appropriate, a note is made in the collaboration activity list below. Important cases where iMarine participates in co-ordination efforts, but where collaboration is not the objective are:

FLUX;

SDMX-Steering Committee;

ABNJ;

Collaboration priorities

From the above initiatives, several priority collaborations emerge that are pursued with more vigor than the others. They promise to deliver clear advantages to the the project consortium and will be important to achieve a sustainable solution for iMarine functionality, the underlying D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. infrastructure, and the gCube technologies.

iMarine technology collaboration priorities

EMI

The collaboration with the EMI project, developed during the D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative.-II project, has continued in the context of iMarine with a signed Memorandum of Understanding between the two projects. The MoU defines three main goals of the collaboration:

• Access to EMI build services: iMarine depends on the EMI to build its core software, gCube. EMI should provide iMarine access to its build services (ETICS) where the project can register its gCube projects, create configurations for their components, build and test these projects and access the service repository and associated reports.. iMarine, through its partner Engineering SPA, is responsible for maintaining and providing support for ETICS web configuration UI, a component of the the EMI build services components developed by Engineering SPA.

• EMI release preview and exploitation: iMarine has access to pre-production release of EMI products via the EMI Integration Testbed and subject to its acceptance criteria, iMarine should upgrade its infrastructure’s gLite nodes to the latest versions of the components released by EMI.

• iMarine feedback and requirements: iMarine will evaluate the suitability of EMI products to meet its requirements and reliability of the services it provides. Feedback, recommendations and lessons learned should be provided to validate and improve EMI services. Feature requests for EMI products may be submitted for new or improved capabilities of EMI products

EUBrazilOpenBio

http://www.eubrazilopenbio.eu/

This project is co-funded by the European Commission and the Brazilian Minister of Science Technology and Innovation (MCTI). The project aims at offering to the biodiversity scientific community an e-infrastructure giving access to domain relevant open-access resources (data, tools, services and computing) and supporting their exploitation. The e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. is epected to be built by federating and integrating existing European and Brazilian technologies and resources.

The liaison between iMarine and EUBrazilOpenBio is oriented to share the infrastructure and software artifacts and to promote a cross fertilisation among the two Community of Practices the projects deal with. The infrastructure needs of the EUBrazilOpenBio community have been covered by creating a specific Virtual OrganizationA dynamic set of individuals or institutions defined around a set of resource-sharing rules and conditions. All these virtual organizations share some commonality among them, including common concerns and requirements, but may vary in size, scope, duration, sociology, and structure. in the D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. The use of the same infrastructure facilitates the sharing of the resources that are deployed in the infrastructures, for example, gCube Hosting nodes can be shared, as well as specific service instances, can be used by both the projects thus realising an economy of scale scenario.

Among the shared software artifacts, a primary role is played by the gCube Species Data Discovery service, i.e. a service conceived to provide its users with seamless access to Species Data (Taxonomy Items and Occurrence Points) from the major providers and Information Systems, like GBIF and Catalogue of Life. The core of the service has been designed and developed in the iMarine project while a number of plugins (specifically conceived to interface with a target Information System) have been developed in the context of EUBrazilOpenBio, namely plugins interfacing with speciesLink and BrazilianFlora. EUBrazilOpenBio in turn has contributed to the design and development of facilities supporting the production of checklists, i.e. lists of taxonomy items that can be used to compare the Species characterizations own by each Information System as to discover potential misplacements and incomplete characterizations. Other software artifacts characterising this collaboration are the Cross Mapping and the Niche Modeling Services. These have been developed by EUBrazilOpenBio project and they are expected to be reused by iMarine. The former is a Service for comparing two checklists, the latter is a Service for using the openModeller Technology to model, test and project species distribution probabilistic models.

As a side effect of this strict collaboration at technological level, there was also an involvement of the Communities of Practice addressed. For example, iMarine has been invited to present its achievements at relevant events organized by the EUBrazilOpenBio community members (…), both in Europe and in Brazil.

ENVRI (Common Operations of Environmental Research infrastructures)

http://www.envri.eu

ENVRI is a project that aims at establishing a collaboration between the cluster of ESFRI projects operating in the Environment area, with support from ICT experts, to develop common e-science components and services for their facilities. The expected result is a speed up the construction of these infrastructures and a common layer for scientists to use the data and software from each facility to enable multi-disciplinary science.

The liaison between iMarine and ENVRI is oriented to share technological artifacts and to promote a cross fertilisation among the two Community of Practices the projects deal with.

As a result of the analysis of the requirements specified from the different ESFRI infrastructures, it has emerged that a primary role is played by services specifically conceived to deal with Geospatial data. In order to satisfy this need it was decided that the suite of services initially designed and developed in the context of iMarine will be consolidated and enhanced when used in the ENVRI settings. This suite is a comprehensive yet open set of services implementing and benefitting from the OGC standards (namely WCSWeb Coverage Service, WMSSee Workload Management System or Web Mapping Service., WFSWeb Feature Service, WPS, CSW) enabling the Discovery of such data, their processing as well as their publications. ENVRI will contribute to this framework by developing specific data processing methods that can also be reused by iMarine.

ENVRI does not plan to set up an own infrastructure. The services developed will be hosted for experimentation purposes in the D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. infrastructure. This will facilitate their exploitation also in the iMarine application environments.

LifeWatch

http://www.lifewatch.eu

LifeWatch is a European Research Infrastructure for Biodiversity currently under development. The first services to users are planned for 2013. Through this infrastructure users may benefit from integrated access to a variety of data, analytical and modeling tools as served by a variety of collaborating initiatives. The infrastructure is also expected to give accessto selected workflows for specific scientific communities able to exploit offered data and tools and to offer facilities for constructing personalized ‘virtual labs' allowing to enter new data and analytical tools. New data will be shared with the data providers cooperating with LifeWatch. A number of meetings have been held between iMarine and LifeWatch Service Center representatives to explore possible common interests and synergies. During these meetings the two parties have recognized that iMarine services might be usefully exploited also in the LifeWatch application context. It has then decided to start-up an explorative collaboration that will initially include the following actions: a) Training material produced by iMarine will be incorporated in the LifeWatch training modules disseminated by the Service Center; b) iMarine will organise a technological face-to-face training event centered on the development of those iMarine services that are more related to the LifeWatch objectives, like the integrated access to a variety of data, analytical and modeling tools and the Virtual Labs support; c) iMarine representatives will follow the requirements of the LifeWatch “Alien Species Showcase” to evaluate the feasibility of hosting on the iMarine infrastructure also a VREVirtual Research Environment. dedicated to scientists studying alien species in the marine environment.

(info on the Showcase as reported in the LifeWatch site) This study case is developed through an inter-operability exercise on a set of databases covering collections of species along a ideal transect ranging from the deep regions of the Southern Adriatic-Ionian Sea to the high altitude woodlands in Central and Northern Italy.
Ecosystem fragility will be evaluated from the proportion of native and alien species; similarly the vulnerability of taxonomic or functional groups will be evaluated from the proportion of native and alien species within every group. The accessibility of data stored in distributed databases will allow mapping ecosystem vulnerability on the layer of ecosystem types in Italy.
Bio-molecular data on selected species and species groups will provide services with the observation of individuals and populations.
By using the simple traits selected for the analysis, estimates of the scenario of change for ecosystem services in the different types of ecosystems will be performed.
The study case is easily expansible to ecosystems in other EU countries, covering a wider range of ecosystem types and taxonomic groups.


SciencePAD

http://sciencepad.web.cern.ch/

SciencePAD is an initiative coordinated by EMI in collaboration with ILL, EMBL-EBI, Ex Machina with the participation of other projects and companies developing or using software for scientific applications.

SciencePAD is an initiative to assist scientific communities in finding the software they need, to promote the development and use of open source software for scientific research and provide a one-stop-shop to match user needs and software products and services.

The initiative was started informally in September 2011 with a first round of discussions among representatives of various projects and other interested parties. In December 2011 a Steering Commitee (SC) has been formed to formally discuss the mandate, scope, functions, funding models, governance structure and membership rules. The SC has presented the outcome of the initial discussion to a larger community of software developers and users in February 2012 at a workshop organized at CERN on open source software for scientific research and currently a project proposal has been submitted to EC in the context of FP7 framework.

iMarine as one of the projects ( together with EUBrazilOpenBio and ENVRI) which is supporting and developing the gCube Software Framework is part of the SciencePAD software catalogue and it took part to the brainstorming phase of the initiative. Depending on the approval of the EC project proposal, iMarine will also evaluate to sign an MoU with the project in order to further exploit the catalogue and other initiatives that may follow.

EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.

VLIZ

The sub-contract with VLIZ aims to reduce the data-management burden for VLIZ, while increasing the quality (indicators)

EMODNet

The collaboration with EMODNet is given shape through a collaboration with VLIZ. The consumption of Species data by the infrastructure allows biodiversity data managers to harmonize and upgrade the quality of their data products. The collaboration is currently at the level of aligning standards, but when effective products are made available in the e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large., this may result in collaboration at service and VREVirtual Research Environment. level.

FishFinder

The collaboration with the FAO Species Identification and has as working title [FishFinder]. The collaboration allows the e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. access to a rich resource of species information, while the group will be equiped with a reporting environment to add Species Identification Sheets. the Toolset evidences the value of the iMarine reporting tools, including the work-flow and templating functions.

VocBench

The collaboration with the VocBench aims to enrich the e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. with vocabulary management tools. The need is in the management of code lists of relevance to the iMarine EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.; Local Species names, Gears, Ports, etc. To this end, the VocBench is enriched by the project with specific facilities, this collaboration, known as [Cotrix] started in Jan 2013, and FAO oversees the activities. A first result is expected in early April 2013, after which the mapping between code lists and data will be added. The priority is high.

TunaAtlas

The collaboration with the Tuna Atlas data managers in FAO aims to establish an interconnected network of geospatial data. This will enable the seamless consumption of FAO species distribution maps by iMarine services, and vice, versa, allow the re-use of iMarine geospatial products in FAO. The collaboration aligns the metadata registration in the respective GeoNetwork instances, and has high priority.

Data.fao.org

The collaboration with data.fao.org is a key if iMarine manages to position itself a a data suite for resource poor initiatives. This would enable a cost-effective means to geographically dispersed institutions to share their data with FAO and the world at large. In FAO, the core IT department collaborates with iMarine to develop data sharing facilities. iMarine has contributed the OpenSDMX codebase and is now co-developing with CIO. The resources can already be consumed by iMarine through the SDMX Registry and Repository: http://data.fao.org/sdmx/index.html

The registry base URL is: http://data.fao.org/sdmx/registry

For instance, the indicator codelist can be obtained with: http://data.fao.org/sdmx/registry/codelist/FAO/CL_INDICATOR/1.0

Collaboration at this stage is implemented at the level of aligning iMarine and FAO standards and protocols, and data exchange.

Eurostat

FAO has a long-term collaboration with Eurostat through the SEIF project. This has resulted in the alignment of codes, and the sharing of data using SDMX. The integration of SDMX in the e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large. will enable a collaboration also at the level of software development and work-flow support. Priority is medium, as most of the components have already been delivered.

VME-DB

FAO is a strong partner in the Vulnerable Marine Ecosystem Data Base project, where it also proposed the exploitation of iMarine services for e.g. data management, species taxonomy and occurrence data, maps and reporting. The project has yet to decide on the software infrastructure, but the exploitation of one or more VREVirtual Research Environment.'s is foreseen. The priority is high.

Others

The iMarine capabilities have been demonstrated to a large number of other initiatives, and /or interested individuals. Several of these have expressed an interest to become involved, and early negotiations have started with e.g. GOLD and BestTuna to offer services for these initiatives, also with a view on future sustainability.