FAIR-EASE AND EUROSCIENCEGATEWAY JOIN FORCES
Two Horizon Europe projects focused on the development and deployment of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)—FAIR-EASE and EuroScienceGateway (ESG)—have agreed to cooperate closely over the next three years to extend the Galaxy Platform to FAIR data analysis to a wider group of scientific user communities.
The cooperation will include shared computing resources, joint workshops and an amalgamation of FAIR-EASE tools and workflows to be run through the distributed computing network being developed by the ESG project. The aim is to assess whether FAIR-EASE’s Earth Analytical Lab (EAL) can be based on ESG.
“Synchronising the work of ESG and FAIR-EASE is good news for the users of EOSC,” said Björn Grüning, project coordinator of ESG. “We believe that if ESG and FAIR-EASE combine our efforts we can achieve more for our users and utilise European resources more effectively. This is a way of working that the European Commission and the EOSC Association have been encouraging among the EOSC-related projects.”
Over the past decade, many scientific fields have been transformed into data-driven disciplines based on the exchange and integration of internationally distributed data. Exploiting this data remains a laborious and largely manual task, prone to loss and error, and increasingly specialized beyond the technical capabilities of most users. FAIR practices are encouraged, but their adoption curve demonstrates the difficulty of implementing them. Needs for compute and data resources, tools, and application platforms are often domain-specific.
Many scientists struggle to navigate complex ecosystems. Typically, researchers lack the computing skills to effectively use the high-performance computing (HPC) or cloud platforms they need. Thus, new approaches are needed to enable all researchers, with a wide variety of digital skills, to effectively use the various computing infrastructures available across Europe, for both asynchronous and interactive applications.
