Speaker
Sverker Holmgren
(VR-SNIC)
Description
Both the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the European Data
Infrastructure (EDI) are envisaged as federated initiatives that will be
built on top of country-level counterparts in order to succeed. The
e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) addressed this point already
in its 2016 Roadmap and recommended that national governments and
funding agencies should reinforce their efforts to:
1) embrace e-Infrastructure coordination at the national level and build
strong national e-Infrastructure building blocks, enabling coherent and
efficient participation in European efforts;
2) together analyse and evaluate their national e-Infrastructure funding
and governance mechanisms, identify best practices, and provide input to
the development of the European e-Infrastructure landscape.
Also in the Competitiveness Council conclusions (28/29 May 2018) the
Member States are encouraged to “invite their relevant communities, such
as e-infrastructures, research infrastructures, Research Funding
Organisations (RFO’s) and Research Performing Organisations (RPO’s), to
get organised so as to prepare them for connection to the EOSC.”
However, the current situation across several Member States (MS) and
Associated Countries (AC) is that there are different speeds and levels
of access and integration to the European initiatives.
To proceed, it is imperative that these differences are identified early
on and specific actions are taken at national and European levels. e-IRG
is working to address this challenge; the first step has been to collect
information from each MS/AC about the current status of their
e-Infrastructure, based on a survey addressed to the national
ministries. The second step is conducting an analysis which will be the
core of e-IRG’s next policy document.
In the survey the word e-Infrastructure is assumed to cover various
'layers' or components, in particular: networking, computing, data and
tools & services. The questions focus on acquiring information about the
organizations responsible for providing e-infrastructure services, their
governance model, their funding methods, and their access policies. We
also collected information on national domain-specific e-Infrastructures
or other domain areas of particular interest in each country and whether
they use the horizontal e-Infrastructure services.
The scope of the presentation is thus to present the preliminary
analysis of the survey results, along with a first set of
recommendations for the different stakeholders, namely e-Infrastructure
providers, funders, policy makers and users and get some initial feedback.
We have clustered the countries we have received replies from based on
the existence of few, several or many providers at a national level. The
results show that there is fragmentation in the national providers in
several countries. It can also be seen that fragmentation of service
access and provision exists even in countries with advanced
e-infrastructure services. Also, as in some cases we identified
differences that exist in the number of providers in each domain
(network, computing, data or other) for every cluster we proceed to
further categorization based on the number of organizations with similar
service domains.
Primary author
Jan Wiebelitz
(RRZN, Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Co-author
Dr
Fotis Karagiannis
(Independent)
