Speaker
Overview (For the conference guide)
One of the key challenges faced by e·Infrastructure providers such as EGI.eu, which represents the European Grid Infrastructure of 350 resource centres organised through over 35 national resource infrastructure providers, is to report the diversity and scope of their resources and their usage to funders and decision makers at national and European levels.
The European e·Infrastructures Observatory can provide to the e·Infrastructures community a comprehensive monitoring and dissemination framework that will allow EGI’s stakeholders to keep track of the development and prospects in e·Infrastructures, including a frame of reference for assessing progress over time towards global regions of interest and disseminating success stories of European-led initiatives.
Such a facility can be of great interest and value to EGI and its stakeholders, as a yardstick tool for progress monitoring, analysis and evaluation of Grid and other e·Infrastructures across the European Union and beyond.
Impact
The ICT-based infrastructures are a crucial asset underpinning European research and innovation policies. They make a major contribution to the objectives of the EU 2020 Strategy and the vision for the ERA, and have a key role in supporting the deployment of new research facilities, whose development is articulated with ESFRI and e-IRG policy groups in a dialogue with Member States.
Designing and implementing e·Infrastructure policies and strategies requires proper knowledge of the status of e·Infrastructures’ development in a region/country, including its evolution over time as well as disseminating the results and success stories of respective organizations and individuals.
One of the key challenges faced by e·Infrastructures providers such as EGI.eu, which represents the European Grid Infrastructure of 350 resource centres organised through over 35 national resource infrastructure providers, is to report the diversity and scope of their resources and their usage to funders and decision makers at national and European levels.
The European e·Infrastructures Observatory can provide to the e·Infrastructures community a comprehensive monitoring and dissemination framework that will allow EGI’s stakeholders to keep overall track of the development and prospects in e·Infrastructures for Europe and beyond, including especially a frame of reference for assessing over time European Grid infrastructures towards other global regions of interest, and disseminating worldwide e·Infrastructures success stories of European-led and European-supported initiatives.
Therefore, the European e·Infrastructures Observatory could become a yardstick tool for Grid stakeholders for tracking and detecting trends and potentially initiating actions and initiatives or for informing when drafting new programmes for future developments of Grid e·Infrastructures and overall.
Conclusions
The availability of state-of-the-art European e·Infrastructures to the research community is part of the Europe 2020 vision, the European Commission’s growth strategy for a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. The Grid infrastructure is a core building block of the European e·Infrastructures and thus is anticipated to majorly contribute to Europe’s Digital Agenda strategic priorities.
In the aforementioned framework, EGI’s role and contribution can be properly leveraged and disseminated by a proper monitoring framework of the respective grid developments at National and Pan-European level.
Responding to this strategic need of the Grid community, this paper presents the capabilities and functionality of the European e·Infrastructures Observatory as a comprehensive tool to allow EGI’s stakeholders to keep overall track of the development and prospects in European Grid as well as other key e·Infrastructures.
URL
www.eInfrastructuresobservatory.eu
Description of the Work
The European e·Infrastructures Observatory has already reached a mature functional state, comprising of more than thirty indicators for monitoring the development progress, usage, impact and investments-drawn on Grid as well as on Networking and Supercomputing eInfrastructures in Europe with a set of seven visualisation tools that allow for a multifaceted, multidimensional and polymorphic panorama of e·Infrastructures in Europe.
It currently allows for:
-access to an advanced set of monitoring, dissemination and collaboration tools, including geographical mappings, graphs (bar/line/bubble charts), scatter plots, hierarchically-structured representations, custom-build composite indices allowing to examine interrelations between indicators;
-access to timelines of major events in the history of Grids helping the user to focus on particular periods and select events that are of interest to view their description;
-access to a time series trends service, that displays on a time series graphs, data for all countries over time enabling the identification of the countries that have improved or are still at an early stage in terms of Grid eInfrastructures over the past 10 years;
-access to eagle-eye overviews of national grid initiatives (NGIs) currently established and active all over Europe; global e·Infrastructures organisations, interconnections of the grid and global scientific communities;
-access to specific e·Infrastructures intelligence (developments and trends) through resources monitoring and infrastructure status quo;
-access to a non-geographical spatial map service (treemaps) for displaying indicators that are hierarchically-structured as a set of nested rectangles;
-easier/quicker identification of e·Infrastructures organisations in Europe and beyond, that possess particular competences of interest;
-increased visibility of the EU-led, EU-supported and of EU-interest e·Infrastructures internationally.
