IMarine Liaisons
This page realizes D2.5 Report on inter-projects coordination and collaboration. It reports on interactions with FP7 projects and other R&D national/international programmes on inter-project coordination and collaboration. The page will be enriched with information when individual collaborations and coordinations are added and/or edited.
The collaboration initiatives are first summarized in an overview table.
For each collaboration the following details are then reported:
- A description of the Project/Initiative and its Objectives;
- 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;
- A description of the established collaboration agreement;
- The detailed plan and dates, if this is available.
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 EMI, 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 follows:
- Data sharing; exchange data programmatically between infrastructures;
- VREVirtual Research Environment. Exploitation; deliver a VREVirtual Research Environment. to a new community;
- Software development; share the development of services between frameworks;
- 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;
- 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 :
- Prospect; The iMarine collaboration opportunity has been presented;
- Aborted; The collaboration was not achieved;
- On-hold; The activities are on hold, pending a decision on continuation;
- Planning; The collaboration plan is being drafted;
- Development; the collaboration resources are being developed for implementation;
- Validation; the delivered components (or resource, or the exploitation of existing resources) is being validated by collaboration partners;
- Completed; the collaboration is active.
Progress table
| Collaboration | Planned / New | Last activity | Type | Status |
| Data QC/QA services (VLIZ) | Planned | 03.2013 | Data sharing | Development |
| NEAFC | Planned | 06.2014 | Software development | Development |
| EMI | Planned | 02.2012 | Software integration | Completed |
| Medina project (EU/FP7/ESA) | New | 09.2013 | Software integration | Prospect |
| OCEAN | New | 09.2013 | Software integration | Prospect |
| ERINA+ | Planned | 02.2012 | Software integration | Completed |
| EUBrazilOpenBio | Planned | 07.2013 | Software integration | Development |
| EMODNet Biodiv (DG MARE - VLIZ) | New | 03.2013 | Data sharing | Development |
| ENVRI | New | 10.2012 | Data sharing | Planning |
| FishFinder (FAO) | New | 06.2013 | VREVirtual Research Environment. Exploitation | Completed |
| SmartFish project (FAO) | New | 05.2014 | VREVirtual Research Environment. Exploitation | Development |
| FLOD | New | 06.2014 | Software | Development |
| SPREAD (FAO, CNR, Terradue) | New | 06.2014 | Software | Development |
| Cotrix | New | 06.2014 | Software | Development |
| TimeseriesViewer (FAO, CNR, NKUA) | New | 10.2013 | Software | Development |
| VocBench (FAO) | New | 05.2013 | Software | On-hold |
| Tuna Atlas (FAO/ICIS) | Planned | 06.2014 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | Validation |
| Tuna Atlas (IRD) | New | 09.2013 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | Planning |
| SDMX at Data.fao.org (FAO) | New | 05.2014 | Data sharing | Development |
| Fisheries Chronicles (FAO) | New | 06.2013 | Software development | Planning |
| SEIF2 project (Eurostat) | Planned | 10.2012 | Data sharing | Completed |
| FishFrame RDB (DG MARE/DCF/IRD-MEDDE) | New | 10.2013 | Data sharing | Planning |
| VALID (DG MARE/MEDDE) | New | 10.2013 | Software | Prospect |
| GFCM SCSI | New | 10.2013 | Data sharing | Prospect |
| FLUX Geospatial (DG MARE/MCS) | New | 10.2013 | software | Prospect |
| Fleets socio-economic performance (DG MARE / FAO) | New | 06.2013 | Data sharing | Prospect |
| VME-DB (FAO) | New | 10.2014 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | Completed |
| ABNJ-Tuna (GEF/FAO) | New | 07.2013 | Data sharing | Planning |
| GBIF Access | New | 10.2012 | Data sharing | Completed |
| Lifewatch | Planned | 10.2012 | Data sharing | Development |
| Trendylyzer (IOC, FAO) | New | 05.2014 | Software | Completed |
| BiOnym | New | 06.2014 | Software | Completed |
| Environmental enrichment | New | 09.2014 | Software | Development |
| GOLD (CI) | New | 05.2014 | Data sharing | Planning |
| BESTTuna / Wageningen University | New | 01.2013 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | Prospect |
| SciencePad | New | 01.2013 | Software development | Prospect |
| IGI | New | 10.2012 | Software development | Prospect |
| Helix Nebula | New | 05.2013 | Software development | Prospect |
| GEOWOW | New | 05.2013 | Software development | Planning |
| EcoKnows project (EU/FP7) | New | 05.2013 | Data sharing | Prospect |
| ACRI-ST | New | 05.2013 | Software development | Prospect |
| Indicators for EU fisheries (AgroCampus) | New | 08.2013 | Software development | Prospect |
| GEO BON project | New | 09.2012 | Data sharing | Prospect |
| Too Big To Ignore (TBTI) | New | 03.2014 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | On hold |
| Geodiva project (EU/FP7) | New | 03.2013 | Software Development | Aborted |
| AustralFish | New | 09.2013 | Data sharing | On hold |
| FIPS SpeciesNameFinder | New | 06.2014 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | Released |
| ISFPA | New | 08.2013 | VREVirtual Research Environment. | Prospect |
| ESS FAO | New | 06.2013 | Software | Prospect |
| Spatial data infrastructure (FAO) | New | 06.2013 | Development | Prospect |
| FishBayes (FIN) | New | 11.2013 | Software | Validation |
| Fridtjoff Nansen program (FAO) | New | 09.2013 | Data sharing | Prospect |
| INGV / EMODNET | New | 02.2014 | Data sharing | Prospect |
| IAEA MARiS | New | 06.2014 | Data sharing | Planning |
| ABNJ VME Assessment | New | 04.2014 | Development | Prospect |
| RFMO On Board Recording | New | 05.2014 | Development | Prospect |
| ABNJ Deep-sea Sharks App | New | 09.2014 | Development | Prospect |
| Fisheries Traceability Datahub | New | 09.2014 | Development | Prospect |
Inter-projects Coordination
The inter-project coordination is undertaken with several clear objectives in mind. iMarine is an ambitious initiative the first phase of which aims specifically to establish an e-infrastructure supporting 3 business cases. For iMarine, coordination activities are pursued that can bring benefits in the areas of i) technology development, ii) services and product re-utilization, interoperability and marketing, and iii) sustainable governance of 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..
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
As an outcome of the activities in BC-1, iMarine managed to raise awareness on the importance of adopting a standard exchange protocol for the fisheries operations data domain (Flux – Fisheries Language for Universal eXchange), and of streamlining the data-flows from the fisheries Monitoring-Control-Surveillance (MCS) to the scientific domains in Europe. Through the iMarine Board, the project is now consulted to contribute to several elements of the data-infrastructure related to the support of EU’s common fisheries policy. Through global fisheries standard setting bodies where iMarine Board members are active (CWP), the FLUX initiative was introduced in order to sense the interest of the global community towards joining this initiative.
SDMX
One example that exemplifies the coordination activity results in this area is the invite to take a seat in the SDMX-Steering Committee. Through the activities of FAO Fisheries and CIO departments, the shared FAO / ESTAT datasets development, the iMarine OpenSDMX initiative and informal activities, representatives of iMarine become well known in the SDMX community.
ABNJ
FAO manages important sections of this GEF-project. Effort is made to ensure that software developments are not initiated in parallel by comparing work-plans and activities. These contacts are important to position the iMarine infrastructure and to be able to quickly respond if concrete requirements are brought forward to support this large initiative with data or other resources. Such efforts are developed in the logic of a public partnership business model, whereby each involved organization highlights the benefits expected from joining the iMarine platform with the expected result that new projects will contribute to new developments for the overall benefit of the entire community. Through FAO, iMarine aims to provide services to all three main areas of this project:
- ABNJ-Tuna;
- ABNJ-Deep Seas;
- ABNJ-Capacity Building.
RDA
The objective of the Research Data Alliance is to accelerate and facilitate research data sharing and exchange. The work of the Research Data Alliance is primarily undertaken through its working and interest groups. Participation to these working groups, starting new working groups, and attendance at the twice-yearly plenary meetings is open to all. The initiative is currently supported by he European Commission, NSF and Australian Government through the Australian National Data Service (ANDS).
iMarine is represented in RDA through Donatella Castelli who is both a member of the the RDA Europe Forum & the Marine Data Harmonisation Interest Group, and by others that have registered as members in a number of other working groups.
The iMarine Steering Board, recognizing the importance of the RDA initiative, has decided to put in place actions to increase the active participation of its partners in it.
AgInfra project (EU/FP7)
Through the iMarine Board, the dialog with AgInfra has remained open but it is only by the mid-term of the project that a real collaboration opportunity has emerged with AgInfra; it was deemed important to ensure that the Top Level Ontology (TLO) promoted by FORTH be presented to AgInfra to assess its acceptance in a broader framework. Another stream of collaboration opened in March 2013 concerns the publishing of Fisheries glossaries in Linked Open Data format.
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 defined three main goals of the collaboration:
- Access to EMI build services: iMarine depends on the EMI to build its core software, gCube. EMI provided iMarine access to its build services (ETICS) where the project registered 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, has been 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 had accessed to pre-production release of EMI products via the EMI Integration Testbed and subject to its acceptance criteria, iMarine upgraded its infrastructure’s gLite/EMI nodes to the latest versions of the components released by EMI.
- iMarine feedback and requirements: iMarine evaluated the suitability of EMI products to meet its requirements and reliability of the services it provides. Feedback, recommendations and lessons learned has been provided to validate and improve EMI services.
EMI project ended 04/2013 and a new lightweight collaboration it's being setup ( MEDIA), where iMarine is taking involvement.
MeDIA
To facilitate the development and evolution of middleware solutions beyond short-term project limits, most of the EMI project partners presented an initiative for a long-term, open, lightweight collaboration on the coordination of distributed middleware technologies: the MiddlEware Development and Innovation Alliance (MEDIA). The idea is to promote the coordination of the distribution phase of the software for middleware technology, not only limited to the ones developed in EMI but also to other middleware and software distributions results of EU funded projects. After a first collaboration draft proposed and discussed in April 2013 in a dedicated meeting in Rome, the starting of the collaboration is foreseen for September 2013. iMarine by understanding the benefits of being involved in such initiative will try to
- enhance and standardize the gCube software distribution phase by having access to post-EMI know how.
- further promote gCube among other communities.
OCEAN (Open Cloud for Europe, JApan and beyond)
The project OCEAN ("Open Cloud for Europe, JApan and beyond") has a fundamental goal to foster the emergence of a sustainable open source cloud ecosystem and boost market innovation in Europe, by generating greater efficiency and economies of scale among collaborative research projects on open source cloud computing. OCEAN provides a catalogue name Open Cloud Directory (http://www.ocdirectory.org) , where it's possible to find information about the key outcomes of Open Cloud projects. iMarine is going to provide information about its cloud assets in order to be listed in the cloud directory to enhance dissemination of the project outcomes.
ERINA+
ERINA+ is an EU funded project to assess the socio-economic impact of e-Infrastructures and develop an assessment methodology for e-Infrastructures projects to self-evaluate their own impact.
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 expected 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 fertilization 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 The List of Species of the Brazilian Flora. 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 (e.g. Advancing Biodiversity e-science innovation through Global Cooperation Workshop), both in Europe and in Brazil.
ENVRI (Common Operations of Environmental Research infrastructures)
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.
On the other side, the availability of a specific VREVirtual Research Environment. dedicated to ENVRI in the D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. infrastructure, ENVRI VRE, offers iMarine an opportunity for demonstrating some of its facilities to this CoPCommunity of Practice.. One potential target is the LifeWatch part of the ENVRI consortium.
LifeWatch
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 LifeWatch infrastructure is also expected to give access to 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 has initially included the following actions:
- iMarine representatives have been following 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. This study case is developed through an interoperability 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.
- The joint "Data Sharing and Enrichment: iMarine and LIFEWATCH Solutions & Experiences" Workshop will be held at the EUDAT Conference on 28 October 2013 [1]:
- Training material produced by iMarine is being incorporated in the LifeWatch training modules disseminated by the Lifewatch Service Center.
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.
It aims at assisting 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) was formed to formally discuss the mandate, scope, functions, funding models, governance structure and membership rules. The SC 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 .
iMarine - which is supporting and developing the gCube Software Framework (together with EUBrazilOpenBio and ENVRI) - is part of the SciencePAD software catalogue and it took part to the brainstorming phase of the initiative.
OpenAIREPlus
OpenAIREplus (2nd Generation of Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) was launched in December 2011. The 30 month project, funded by the EC 7th Framework Programme, works in tandem with OpenAIRE, extending the mission further to facilitate access to the entire Open Access scientific production of the European Research Area, providing cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes. This large-scale project brings together 41 pan-European partners, including three cross-disciplinary research communities.
Communities served/involved are all EC Projects and their members and scientists.
The collaboration agreement is established around:
- Alignment of technologies (mid and long term vision)
- Exchange of technologies (tentative)
- Exchange of expertise
- Joint development of new technologies (we envisage a common mobile client for information retrieval)
Up to now the collaboration activities include a number of meetings / teleconferences such as a joint teleconference CNR / NKUA on technical aspects of the infrastructure (January 2013) and a series of NKUA meetings including members of the two teams.
In the future, the objective of the collaboration is to evaluate further options for technological convergence.
EarthServer
EarthServer is establishing open access and ad-hoc analytics on extreme-size Earth Science data, based on and extending leading-edge Array Database technology. The community of practice served/involved is the earth Observation Scientists and Geologists
The established collaboration agreement includes
- Evaluation of the applicability of Array DBs for iMarine data
- Evaluation of standards for adoptability
- Exchange of best practices
Performed actions include
- Joint meeting in July 2012 on the feasibility of technology exchange
- Joint participation to the EarthCube Brehmen Workshop
- Aligned technologies: Java, Liferay portals.
For the future, the planned actions include revisiting of the case of technology exchange in appropriate time and the exchange of best practices
FP7 RDA-Europe for Ocean Data Interoperability
RDA-Europe focuses on coordinating a series of cross-infrastructure experiments on global interoperability with a selected group of projects and communities. Each prototype addresses a specific community driven use case indentifying best-of-breed solutions and the remaining challenges. The RDA Europe Prototype Programme is developed in synergy with the RDA Europe Analysis Programme devoted to analyzing data organizations and solutions as they emerge from the various scientific communities and the RDA Europe Workshop Programme covering the investigation data infrastructure convergence and reaching out to new research communities.
In this context iMarine collaborates within a focus group (user community) for Ocean Data Interoperability.
ROpenSci
rOpenSci develops R-based tools to facilitate acess to open data and open science. iMarine plans to align activity with representatives of the Advisory board members of ROpenSci.
rOpenSci develops R-based tools for acess to Open Data and Open Science. The 2013 RopenSci data challenge is now just launched
Several R packages are already curated, including on the Fisheries.
GEOWOW
Synergies exist between between iMarine & GEOWOW that have been identified, and have been now discussed (joint telecons) and tested (services accessed) for exploitation. A two way collaboration between iMarine and GEOWOW FP7 projects is foreseen as follows:
- iMarine supports the GEOWOW effort to outreach scientific community (WPS-Hadoop processing Service),
- GEOWOW develops cloud-based services to access and process ocean acidification projections (ESGF CMIP5 Gateway).
Additional services can be considered in this perspective (e.g. Species Kernel Density algorithm)
The shared objective is to have a MoU highlighting how to strengthen the linkages between: scientific communities accross marine ecosystem experts, biologists (studies on pteropods...) and the Climate specialists, as well as the outreach towards GEOSS communities that GEOWOW is addressing (Global Earth Observing System of Systems).
As user community brokers, both projects also share a common role in bringing users and data towards European Research e-Infrastructures (EGI, Helix Nebula, D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative.), where business models need to be established and validated against user communities needs and operations.
The GEOWOW project has already a connection with ESFRI (ENVRI cluster for instance) via inclusion of results from the GENESI-DEC FP7 project (brought by ESA and Terradue project partners).
There is also an interest to further develop that connection especially expressed by the UNESCO IOC partner. iMarine is in discussion with them to clarify objectives in this regard; these relate to ENVRI contribution to GEOSS, and possibly the BluePlanet activity stream.
Helix Nebula
Helix Nebula (HN) has recently achieved important milestones, and concrete steps, more opened to the outside world, are now starting. Especially, the recently created Services Architecture and the soon to be launched Business Architecture activity streams in HN are of interest for iMarine.
On the Services Architecture side:
- Work is starting on the Data Management topic;
- Terradue delivered several inputs to this group, that can provide good anchors to the way the iMarine 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. operates / plans to operate;
- A synergy at this level would address the processing between Helix Nebula (compute infrastructure) and iMarine (science data curation), with a linkage between them for externalizing to the HN Cloud some highly demanding compute operations.
The Helix Nebula EC FP7 project (312301 - Support Action) completed its first review on 3rd July 2013, with a reviewers assessment acknowledging a clear vision and well defined goals. Recommendations concerning future work, that can be leveraged for coordination with iMarine, was to build, formalise and document cooperation (in a structured manner) with other FP7 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. projects. In particular, the HN cooperation with EGI will be strengthened, notably through a test case with the EGI Federated Cloud, at the horizon Jan-Apr 2014, for which a preparatory workshop (https://indico.egi.eu/indico/sessionDisplay.py?sessionId=40&confId=1417#20130917) is planned for Sept. 17th 2013 in Madrid.
iMarine has many tools available or planned to enact such data staging and application provisioning operations for on-demand, time constrained operations. Terradue intends to play an active role as part of iMarine in supporting these operations.
IGI
IGI is the Italian branch of the EGI initiative, and has been contacted to align the iMarine plans for the exploitation of EGI facilities with the IGI planning.
"Current situation"
iMarine provides access to a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) that covers all steps of a spatial data lifecycle: from registration of spatial products, generation and publication of ISO 10139 metadata, product discovery, storage of the data product, access via Web Map Service, Web Coverage ServiceSupports the networked interchange of geospatial data as "coverages" containing values or properties of geographic locations. Unlike the Web Map Service, which returns static maps (server-rendered as pictures), the Web Coverage Service provides access to intact (unrendered) geospatial information., and Web Feature ServiceOpenGIS Specification that supports INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, QUERY and DISCOVERY of geographic features. WFS delivers GML representations of simple geospatial features in response to queries from HTTP clients. Clients access geographic feature data through WFS by submitting a request for just those features that are needed for an application., processing of data via Web Processing Service, and visualization. iMarine maintains and operates a computational infrastructure to offer those features by integrating and enhancing several heterogeneous technologies, including but not limited to cluster of balanced GeoServer instances, replicated GeoNetwork servers, and cluster of Thredds servers.
"Vision"
Enhancing the current IGI infrastructure by offering support for spatial data products could greatly enlarge the consumers of the IGI infrastructure. iMarine could provide a complete and operational SDI to the IGI users. A collaboration will be proposed later in 2013.
EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. collaboration priorities
Details on specific collaborations are reported on th eiMarine website. The work-in-progress, accessible for iMarine staff only, are available in the EA-CoP Collaboration Priority pages.
