EOSC-PILLAR project

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) seeks to offer European scientists and professionals in the sectors of science and technology, human and social sciences a virtual European space for managing research data. It consists of open-science, transparent services to store, manage, analyse and reuse these data across borders and scientific disciplines, federating existing infrastructures and services.

The EOSC-Pillar project (2019-2022) aims to coordinate national open science efforts across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy, ensuring their contribution to and readiness for implementation of the EOSC. The initiative proposes to share best practices and encourage interdisciplinary approaches within the EOSC.

EOSC-Pillar also aims to establish national and transnational FAIR data services. To achieve this goal, technical, social and organizational barriers will have to be removed to ensure Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse of research data.

This European project has a budget of €12m and federates numerous international partners, for example the University of Vienna (Austria), Ghent University (Belgium), CINES, CNRS, Ifremer, INRAE, INRIA and INSERM (France), DKRZ, Fraunhofer, GFZ and KIT (Germany) and CINECA, CMCC, CNR, INFN and Trust IT (Italy).

Ifremer and CNRS are contributing to several work packages, with Data Terra responsible for overall coordination.

Work Packages in which Data Terra is involved

Work Package 4 (WP4): From National Initiatives to Transnational Services

This work package defines a policy and legal framework for coordinating national initiatives.

Its main objectives are to:

Build on the findings of WP3 studies to highlight common policies and approaches adopted at the national level
Highlight critical issues in national legal and policy frameworks that can hamper collaboration and interoperability, and suggest ways to address these challenges
Explore transnational federation opportunities and procedures
Provide a policy framework, and define common tools and frameworks
Study possible business models for national initiatives and their services, building on the results of the survey and in collaboration with the use cases (WP6) and pilots (WP7)

Data Terra is more particularly involved in task 4.5 (business models, cost and funding) that CNRS is coordinating.

Work Package 6 (WP6): EOSC in action – Use cases and community-driven pilots

WP6 of EOSC-Pillar aims through use cases based on the requirements of scientific communities to improve data usage from a FAIR perspective. However, each community has more or less structured and developed tools and services tailored to their specific needs and constraints. The overriding objective of WP6 is therefore to prepare scientific communities to get involved in EOSC by validating cross-cutting services through structured interaction between communities, working with the other project parties (Data layer and Infrastructure layer).

➡️ Read the Work Package 6 presentation document

Use case 6.2: Agile FAIR Data for Environment and Earth System Communities (Ifremer)

Earth environment sciences and geosciences rely on a broad spectrum and large volume of data from satellites, in-situ observations and climate models. These data are managed and preserved separately in domain-dependent repositories of national or European infrastructures. As the data sources are widely distributed, it is very hard to achieve inter-processing and integrated usage of the data for comprehensive studies at domain or cross-domain level.

In this context, the goal is to offer services that facilitate and speed access to distributed data sources and to provide a Web-based processing environment for Data Science notebooks supporting the Pangeo community platform. This use case aims also to enhance data discovery and data access, relying on existing services provided by Earth sciences communities, like Data Terra in France and in Europe the consortium of Environment Research Infrastructures (ENVRI), the climate science community, and beyond.

➡️ Learn more about use case 6.2

Work Package 7 (WP7): The Infrastructure layer: delivering horizontal data storage and computing services, from national to transnational

This work package covers technical guidelines and procedures for integrating national services to foster compatibility and interoperability of existing horizontal services between national and thematic infrastructures.