Tiziana Ferrari rounds up EOSC-hub’s successful activities
To showcase the success of the project in practice, we can look directly at its key exploitable results. EOSC-hub’s KERs have been supporting the building of the EOSC services, ensuring the quality of service components and providing best practices and tools for linking services to the Hub and specifically:
- design, implementation and operations of the EOSC Portal and Marketplace, which is now active and running 8 Competence Centres with more than 270 services including 30 thematic services published, from over 130 providers.
- 13 use cases on-board with 75 planned integrations for the Early Adopter Programme initiative which selects scientific communities interested in adopting and integrating multiple EOSC-hub services
- definition and development of the EOSC Federating Core, the EOSC Service Management System (SMS) that fosters robust and resilient services delivery, facilitates communication between customers and providers as well as aligns service management activities of all providers and integrates different services into the common marketplace.
- definition of Rules of Participation (RoP) which enable the easy integration of new service providers into the EOSC ecosystem while ensuring the quality and compliance of the overall services and building and maintaining the trust of the users and user communities.
- technical specifications and interoperability guidelines (13) that allow data and software portability across multiple facilities and foster EOSC uptake. The project also designed an EOSC Technical Reference Architecture that includes functions, interfaces, APIs and standards as technical concepts
- EOSC Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) a platform established to support industrial R&D and academic research in their accessing and sharing of EOSC tools and services. A total of 11 business pilots have joined the EOSC hub and 4 services on-boarded in EOSC Marketplace, another 5 new pilots to be started)
- design of EOSC business models
- network of trainers created with over 100 training events attended by more than 2000 people, and with a revamped training catalogue
A lot of important events were also taken place during the past year:
- The Realising the European Open Science Cloud, a four-day program which showcased the results achieved as well as increased awareness in new tools and techniques to improve data FAIRness and prepare to be aggregated into the EOSC Portal. As part of this event, the EOSC Projects EXPO was the first virtual exhibition showcasing initiatives and projects of the European Open Science Cloud. The vibrant forum attracted more than 800 decision makers, enthusiasts and stakeholders of the EOSC.
- The EOSC Symposium 2020 brought together researchers, data scientists, e-Infrastructures, research infrastructures, EOSC projects, EOSC Working Group members and representatives of the EU27 Member States and associated countries to discuss the final steps towards the establishment of a first version of a fully-fledged European Open Science Cloud.
- The virtual EOSC-hub Week 2020 brought together key players in the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), collocated with the EOSC Executive Board Consultation Day.
Another important aspect of EOSC-Hub project is collaboration and combination of efforts with other important EC projects (OpenAIRE Advance and EOSC Enhance) bringing changes to the EOSC Portal. The year 2020 has been heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic but we still managed to overcome it by planning, organization and good teamwork, to still deliver quality works in time, maintain transparent and good communication with partners.
The EOSC-Hub project is coming to its end, but its enormous results and impacts have really paved the way for the future of European research and innovation.
Tiziana Ferrari is the Project Coordinator of EOSC-hub.
