BLUE-CLOUD SERVICES project

The Blue-Cloud Services project is the first part of the Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative resulting from a Horizon 2020 call for proposals. It is the ‘marine’ strand of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

This three-year project is seeking to exploit the potential of open science based on ‘clouds’ to implement a set of services geared towards gaining new insights into and managing the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a series of five Blue-Cloud pilot demonstrators.

The broad ambition of Blue-Cloud Services is to federate:

European multi-disciplinary marine data from in-situ sensors, satellites and models
computing platforms forming a virtual environment
analytics tools

Blue-Cloud has developed strong synergies at European level, federating the main marine data infrastructures—SeaDataNet, EurOBIS, Euro-Argo, Argo GDAC, EMODnet, ELIXIR-ENA, EuroBioImaging, DIAS, CMEMS and ICOS-Marine—as well as EOSC infrastructures (e.g. EUDAT and D4Sciences).

Five pilot demonstrators

Five demonstrators are serving as virtual laboratories, working with top-level marine research scientists:

Biodiversity → EOV Zoo and Phytoplankton products
Genomics → Plankton genomics
Environment → Marine environment indicators
Fisheries → A question of scale
Aquaculture → Monitoring aquaculture

Through the Blue-Cloud platform, virtual laboratories will provide services like access to datasets, products and processing routines useful for analysing datasets and reusing research products. Blue-Cloud demonstrators aim to prove that the lag between research and innovation in the field of marine science can be reduced.

Blue-Cloud consortium

The Blue-Cloud consortium brings together the main European marine data infrastructures and the EOSC’s digital infrastructures. The project is being coordinated by Trust-IT Services, with MARIS responsible for technical coordination. An influential committee of experts from external stakeholders and a group of science foresight experts are supporting the project.

French stakeholders involved in the project include the IRD development research institute, the Ifremer institute of marine research and exploration, Sorbonne University and CNRS.

Ifremer is leading WP3 Blue-Cloud Pilot Demonstrators, which encompasses all activities related to setting up, structuring and implementing these five demonstrators aimed at highlighting the potential of the Blue-Cloud architecture and services. This work package will also define demonstrators’ needs and put in place validation and feedback mechanisms to make sure that demonstrators are user-oriented.