The official website of DI4R 2017 is: https://www.digitalinfrastructures.eu/
The official Twitter feed of DI4R 2017 is: @DI4R_eu
Europe's leading e-infrastructures, EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, OpenAIRE, PRACE and RDA Europe, invite all researchers, developers and service providers for two days of brainstorming and discussions at the Digital Infrastructures for Research 2017 event, from 30 November to 1 December 2017.
Under the theme “Connecting the building blocks for Open Science”, the 2017 edition of the DI4R conference will showcase the policies, processes, best practices, data and services that, leveraging today’s initiatives – national, regional, European and international – are the building blocks of the European Open Science Cloud and European Data Infrastructure. The overarching goal is to demonstrate how open science, higher education and innovators can benefit from these building blocks, and ultimately to advance integration and cooperation between initiatives.
The event is collocated with the EOSCpilot 1st Stakeholder Engagement Event taking place on the 28 & 29 November 2017.
The session will showcase how national digital service providers supporting research and open science, are strategically getting organized nationally to increase cross-coordination, strategy making and sustainability.
Purpose of the session is share information and best practices about:
- governance of national digital research infrastructures and their funding models,
- roadmaps and national policy agendas for open science and the infrastructures serving the different components of open science
During the session pathways to increase the availability of digital resources and services for researchers and Open Science in Europe and beyond will be discussed.
eInfraCentral (EIC) is a coordination and support action funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Its mission is to ensure that by 2020 a broader and more varied set of users discovers and accesses the existing and developing e-infrastructure capacity. The underlying idea is to create a marketplace. For that, eInfraCentral has engaged in an open discussion with e-infrastructures to define a common service catalogue for their services. A beta version of the eInfraCentral Portal has been created, the gateway for users to browse the service catalogue with all the functionality that has been defined via a survey, desk research on reference marketplaces, and expert advice from European e-Infrastructure flagship initiatives. The next step is to further align the services on offer and test the portal with potential users. This session at DI4R aims to substantially contribute to this process.
The uptake of e-infrastructures by a wider set of stakeholders has been slow primarily due to issues of fragmentation of service offerings, lack of service discoverability, comprehensibility and clarity, as well as the inconsistent use of performance indicators for assessing added value and impact across different service providers at national and international level. The service harmonisation and uniform representation of e-Infrastructures have been key driving elements in the development of eInfraCentral. In order to achieve this, two main challenges need to be addressed. First, a common service catalogue requires alignment of various different e-infrastructure service offerings along a commonly agreed service description. Such an approach to defining and monitoring e-infrastructures services will increase their uptake and enhance understanding of where improvement can be made in delivering services. Secondly, for future updates of the service catalogue and related performance indicators, automatic data harvesting/exchange need to be ensured in a manner interoperable with existing service providers’ practices and data repositories.
The session will include an introductory word from the European Commission DG CNECT Unit C1 overseeing this initiative and explaining their vision for eInfraCentral. It will then proceed with presentations on the process of service alignment and a demo of the portal. The key objective of the session is to have an active discussion/interaction with the audience. eInfraCentral will prepare a list of questions to kick-start the discussion and will encourage the RIs, VREs and users to bring to the table what they want to see “in”.
This session is targeted at a) e-infrastructure services providers (pan-European, regional and national, monothematic or poly-thematic, uni-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary, etc.), b) virtual research environments (VREs), c) potential users of the e-infrastructure services.
Over the last years there have been significant developments in the way authentication and authorisation is handled by large research collaborations. Everybody recognises the importance of a secure and reliable infrastructure to manage users and groups they belong to, to reduce the number of credentials users need and consequently the services they can access to.
Now more than ever, however researchers feel they should be able to log in once and access as many resources and services as needed regardless of the research or e-infrastructures that offers them. This approach poses new challenges on the r/e-infrastructures service providers.
In this interactive session we would like to both present collaborative approaches as well as get feedback - from the communities beyond those already engaged in AARC and research federations - on the suitability of the approach.
Inspired by the research and infrastructure needs of global collaboration, best practices and architectural models for collaborations have been developed that allow infrastructures to build their own AAI without reinventing the wheel.
We will present this blueprint and the "proxy" concept, and also show (asking research infrastructures to report on their experience) how it's applied to production. Operational and sustainability aspects will be addressed jointly with the AEGIS Infrastructures implementing this blueprint today.
We will ask participants to provide real time inputs using online tools and by organising round tables during the session.
The promotion of cutting-edge solutions for networking, advanced computing, management of big data, trust and identity, open scholarship is paramount to leverage existing investments, avoid duplication and ultimately increase sustainability by supporting a larger number of researchers.
However, various challenges are being faced, like the ability to reach out to an increasing number of researchers and innovators, aggregate demand and the offer from multiple providers. This can be a demanding activity, especially in the case of small and highly distributed research teams. Fortunately, EOSC provides an opportunity for more coordination and integration of outreach activities currently conducted in isolation. This interactive session will discuss the different engagement activities & strategies of organisations involved in supporting use of national and European e-Infrastructures/Research Infrastructures. The session will feature presentations and discussions highlighting national and European opportunities of coordination and collaboration.
Participants will have the opportunity to provide input to the Cooperation Agreement that will involve e-Infrastructures and in particular the future H2020 EINFRA-12 projects EOSC-hub and OpenAIRE-Advance involving EGI, EUDAT, INDIGO and OpenAIRE.
This session addresses Research (e-)Infrastructure managers, research collaboration managers and digital infrastructure providers.
The EOSC will federate existing and emerging horizontal and thematic data infrastructures by providing over 1.7m EU researchers with an environment with free, open services for data storage, management, analysis and re-use across disciplines. It will also promote co-ordination and progressive integration into the EOSC of open data infrastructures and services developed under initiatives focused on specific thematic areas such as Blue Growth, food, health, etc. to accelerate the ongoing transition to a more Open Science and Open Innovation model for research, stimulate intra-and
interdisciplinary research, and increase the impact of research investments and infrastructures.
This session will provide an overview of how a set of pioneering initiatives are already putting into practice the vision of the thematic EOSC in different domains.
It will address aspects of federation, networking and coordination of RIs for the purpose of improving the services provided to research communities and increasing cooperation, sharing and reusability across them.
The session starts from the Blue Growth sector highlighting best practices that can contribute to the EOSC ecosystem. This sector is characterised by the need for a better understanding and prediction of natural phenomena and the impact of human activities on ocean ecosystems, their resilience and effect on climate, including how and why the oceans and its resources are changing. As highlighted by the report of the G7 “Future of the Sea and Oceans Working group” the improvement of global
data sharing infrastructures is instrumental to achieve this objective.
BlueBRIDGE, Building research environments fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education for Blue Growth, and SeaDataCloud, the follow-up of SeaDataNet, are both working in this direction. They are building applications, the so called VREs, that exploit existing e-infras, respectively EGI and EUDAT, existing data sharing activities (such as EMODnet), and leverage on relevant results of past and ongoing global, national and EU projects. Both initiatives are addressing the increased complexity of data sharing and analysis as well as reproducibility within the Blue
Growth, as well as the sharp growth in data volumes.
During the session, through the presentation of concrete use cases, the two initiatives will showcase their early results and will explain how they are benefitting from such horizontal e-infrastructures and what are the challenges that they are facing. The presentations will stimulate the dialogue with the audience and will set the scene for an interactive debate where representatives from parallel initiatives operating in other domains, namely the food and the environmental sector, will be invited to contribute.
The debate will be the opportunity to investigate the following topics:
1. What should be the principles governing the thematic EOSCs?
2. What might be the challenges in implementing them?
3. How can a coherent development among the thematic clouds and between them and more general EOSC related initiatives be assured?
The session will also present a great opportunity for the projects to identify collaboration opportunities, to understand if they can share resources to improve their services and to identify potential overlaps.
Agenda:
14:00 - 14:15 The Blue Cloud and the Food Cloud - Agostino Inguscio, European Commission, Marine Resources Unit of the Bioeconomy Directorate of DG Research & Innovation & Wim Haentjens, European Commission, Directorate-General Research & Innovation – Agri-food unit
14:15 - 14:25 The BlueBRIDGE Project - Pasquale Pagano, CNR-ISTI, BlueBRIDGE Technical Coordinator
14:25 - 14:35 SeaDataCloud - Chris Ariyo, CSC
14:35 - 15:30 Panel discussion
Donatella Castelli, CNR-ISTI, BlueBRIDGE Project Coordinator
Chris Ariyo, CSC, SeaDataCloud
Francisco Hernandez, VLIZ, EMODnet & Lifewatch Marine
Odile Hologne, INRA, eRosa project
Brian Matthews, STFC, EOSCpilot
The session will discuss the needs of the of the Digital Humanities, Language studies and Cultural Heritage (DH+L+CH) research communities about the EOSC, and how these needs require to be addressed. It will also highlight how the PARTHENOS cluster project is working to provide common solutions to Research Infrastructures in this wide domain.
Addressing standards, fostering interoperability and findability with a common data model and supporting research with tools and training will pave the way towards full-fledged participation in EOSC of the researchers in this area.
The research community needs and the solutions achieved so far will be presented in live demonstrations, to be interactively discussed with attendees who are welcome to propose their own problems and verify if the PARTHENOS or other solutions are suitable to address them. Thus the approach will not be a sequence of conference-like theoretical lectures, it will instead consider and interactively discuss practical cases with the public, checking how the PARTHENOS solution fits them.
TARGET AUDIENCE
All researchers, especially those labelled as belonging to the "Long tail of science"
EXPECTED IMPACT
Improve awareness, provide feedback and discuss solutions
STRUCTURE
Participants from the audience are invited to register for two minutes’ statements or for questions. This may be done contacting in advance the moderator (franco.niccolucci@gmail.com) or during the session, if time allows.
Presentations will include:
1. Introduction to the session – Franco Niccolucci, PARTHENOS Project Coordinator
2. The PARTHENOS Joint Data Model (JDM) and catalogue – George Bruseker (FORTH). How the JDM can support cross-discipline interoperability, discoverability and access
3. Mapping data models to the JDM – Alessia Bardi (CNR) How to advance towards integration
4. The PARTHENOS standards survival kit (SSK) – Dorian Seillier (INRIA) Standardization for beginners as the
foundation of every interoperability effort
5. The Data Management Plan made simple – Hella Hollander (KNAW-DANS) No-hassle fulfilling an obligation towards the research community and funding agencies
6. First steps towards the EOSC – Achille Felicetti (PIN) A success story of moving tools to a cloud environment to use and reuse data
7. RIs and e-infrastructures: united we stand, divided we fail – Parallel questions to Franco Niccolucci (PARTHENOS) and Daan Broeder (EUDAT) A mandatory but difficult dialogue between the two pillars of EOSC
Convener
Franco Niccolucci, PARTHENOS coordinator
This session will showcase the capabilities that EDI will need to deliver to enable open science and international research projects, and will provide an opportunity to the audience to discuss how EDI can integrate with complementary e-Infrastructures, Research Infrastructures and the EOSC in general.
In particular, during the session we will discuss how EDI needs to work together with EOSC in a co-ordinated way towards the user, and what interoperability will be needed to meet the EDI and EOSC vision.
A series of stakeholder discussions have taken place over the last two years coordinated as part of the recently completed EDISON project. These events have helped to develop a consensus view on importance and complexity of data-related skills, competences and roles to support data dependent science and businesses. We propose to continue this conversation with a focus on capturing the commonalities and differences between the various research infrastructures and their related scientific domains.
Session aims
The session will bring together practitioners, educators and RI managers to discuss how the Data Science skills can be addressed in education, professional and workplace training, what framework models and approaches need to be developed to create sustainable critical competences and skills management for European research and industry.
The session will provide brief introduction on the EDISON Data Science Framework (EDSF) developed in the EU funded EDISON project and currently published as Release 2 under CC BY Open Source license, proposed roadmap and actions plan to create sustainable skills management and capacity building for EOSC and new Skills Agenda for Europe in general. This will be complemented by short/lightning talks from early implemented and adopter of data science education and training including universities, RIs, industry and governmental organisations. The second part of the session will host a panel of experts, practitioners and policy makers to discuss key actions to address Open Science and EOSC priorities in responding to demand of new skills critical for increasing efficiency and competitiveness of European research and industry.
EDISON Data Science Framework
The EDISON Data Science Framework (EDSF) includes four main components: Data Science Competence Framework (CF-DS), Data Science Body of Knowledge (DS-BoK), Data Science Model Curriculum (MC-DS), Data Science Professional profiles and occupations taxonomy (DSPP), and provide a conceptual framework and a model for building sustainable Data Science Educational Environment addressing needs of different stakeholders and professional groups and industries. The EDSF has been developed with wide participation and contribution from the European academia, research and industry and open for wide use and future development under CC BY Open Source license.
This session aims to stimulate the debate upon perspectives for the European Digital Infrastructures to foster knowledge-building through massively distributed scientific corpora. Several aspects will be tackled, in particular, the advantage of deploying Trusted Digital Repositories (eTDR) in order to offer high quality data curation services.
A panel discussion will aim to raise open issues such as standards to adopt in building eTDR. Different approaches are possible (ISO standards, DSA/WDS, ...).
Security, trust and identity management is especially required by scientific communities that need to process and manage sensitive data. We hope to bring together experts with complementary skills and viewpoints from scientific, e-Infrastructure and management perspectives in the session, and discuss the solutions and gaps that exist.
The session sets the present scene by describing scientific requirements and solutions emerging from the life sciences which has progressed in the field due to pressing demand to analyse sensitive human data. A range of technologies are already being more offered and developed by European e-Infrastructures to meet some these challenges. For example, operational security for the European Open Science Cloud and federated authentication and authorisation services for scientists to enable scientific collaborations at scale.
Scientific communities are important stakeholders for European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). However, there are many open questions from communities on the newly emerged concepts, e.g., what does EOSC means for communities, how communities can benefit from EOSC, and how to connect to EOSC.
ENVRI is a community of the Environmental research infrastructures, projects and networks. Through 2 EU-funded projects, ENVRI has been endeavouring on building service solutions to a set of common challenges from environmental Research Infrastructures (RI), with accumulation of experiences of using pan European e-Infrastructure resources services such as EGI and EUDAT. Those solutions promote a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster infrastructure across Europe.
This session brings ENVRI community to DI4R conference, and from community point of view analysis opportunities and benefits from EOSC. We will start by listening to success stories of using service solutions provided by ENVRI, leading to an open discussion between a mini panel and audience. The objective is to develop an understanding of EOSC for ENVRI, identify gaps and challenging issues, and define a roadmap to connect ENVRI to EOSC.
EXPECTED IMPACT
- The establishment of a forum for environmental scientists, RI service developers, and technology providers to discuss technical challenges and solutions.
- The promotion of new collaborations between user communities, the development teams and e-infrastructure service providers.
- The formulation of a conceptual paradigm for ENVRI-as-a-Service for Open Science Cloud.
TARGET AUDIENCE
- Environmental Research Infrastructures who want to come together to jointly build thematic services to EOSC.
- E-infrastructure technology providers who want to help community requirements.
STRUCTURE
- Four invited talks from representative European environmental RIs on scientific use cases and service solutions (4 x10 mins presentation +Q&A)
- One mini-panel discussion on “A Roadmap for Building ENVRI-as-a-Service to EOSC” (50min)
Before go to the session, please complete the following survey:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ENVRI2EOSC
The lack of interoperability is a major barrier to open data sharing. The barriers between disciplines and organisations have arisen for many historical, technical and cultural reasons, and they are difficult to overcome. If we are to develop wide support for open science, we need to adopt common approaches to support data and service interoperability. In this session, we shall discuss some current activities which are developing best practise for interoperability within and between major European digital infrastructure initiatives.
Recently, the European Commission's Working Group on Rewards under Open Science published the report “Evaluation of Research Careers fully acknowledging Open Science Practices”. Noting that “exclusive use of bibliometric parameters as proxies for excellence in assessment (...) does not facilitate Open Science”, the report concludes that “a more comprehensive recognition and reward system incorporating Open Science must become part of the recruitment criteria, career progression and grant assessment procedures...”
The report includes a useful matrix with evaluation criteria for assessing Open Science activities and recommends that “Open Science activity by researchers should become a cross cutting theme in all of the Work Programmes of Horizon 2020 and, most importantly, in the future Framework Programme, FP9.”
However, rewards and incentives for researchers practicing Open Science are needed now, so that researchers who currently practise Open Science do not get discouraged from doing so, and researchers who are hesitant about it, feel encouraged to engage. Therefore, to promote and accelerate cultural change within the research community, the suggestions described in the European Commission’s report should be put into practice as soon as possible.
But what needs to be done for this to happen? What should be the goals and actions of the different stakeholders (e.g. research institutions, governments and funding bodies, publishers, and principal investigators)? What would be the most effective methods to engage them? And should the progress of the different stakeholders towards recognising Open Science practices be evaluated?
This will be an interactive session, during which the participants will work together to create roadmaps aimed at the different stakeholders. The roadmaps will propose effective methods for engaging these stakeholders, goals for successful embedding of Open Science practice in the evaluation of research careers, and metrics for evaluating the progress of the different stakeholders towards rewarding Open Science activities. The session will start with a short presentation to provide context and set the scene, and it will conclude with a discussion of how to disseminate its results and take the work forward. The outcomes of the participants work will be shared publicly. The authors and contributors to the EC report have been made aware of this workshop and will be informed of its results. The outcomes of this session may thus influence further steps taken by the European Commission on this topic.
Digital scientific data, tools, workflows and services are becoming available at increased speed and unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, a large segment of these digital objects remains unnoticed, un-accessed or un-used beyond their producer team, limiting our abilities of extracting maximum benefit and knowledge from these research investments.
The F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principle was first introduced in a workshop held in Leiden in 2014, where a group of like-minded academic and private stakeholders met to discuss ways to overcome obstacles in data discovery and reuse. While various initiatives are already active defining how FAIR principles can be implemented for research data, more work is needed to understand how services can be made FAIR. Reproducibility of science cannot be achieved without FAIR data processing services.
This session aims to introduce initiatives that are tackling this problem space and will offer a forum to discuss future work needed to offer a platform for the development and operation of FAIR services. This session is intended for prospective EOSC service providers, technology providers and software providers from research infrastructures, research projects and scientific collaborations.
The presentations and discussion of the session aim at answering the following questions:
1. What makes a service FAIR?
2. How do different initiatives, tools, protocols, policies and processes support FAIR service providers?
3. How should FAIR-compliant services be identified, certified and shared within EOSC?
4. How should the EOSC community coherently support the developers and operators of FAIR services?
The proposed session discusses ways of supporting the EOSC vision by fostering
collaboration between infrastructures and bringing into the spotlight Text and Data Mining (TDM) as a valuable research instrument opening up new highways in (multi-/cross-) disciplinary research.
The session is structured in two parts.
The first part consists of presentations that introduce the topic of TDM and give an overview of the services OpenMinTeD offers to research communities, the technical and legal barriers it aims to overcome and the solutions it has adopted.
The second part is an interactive discussion with a panel of experts on Open Science, Infrastructures and Text Data Mining.