EOSC-hub contribution to the EOSC open consultation on Rules of Participation

Tiziana Ferrari summarises the project’s recommendations

The EOSC Open Consultation on Rules of Participation and FAIR Data was launched by the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) to gather feedback from the stakeholders on this critical area for EOSC implementation. The consultation is part of the HLEG activities aiming to advise the European Commission on the measures needed to implement the European Open Science Cloud.

EOSC-hub responded to the consultation with a contribution focused on Rules for Participation for service providers, extracted from the project’s ongoing work on the theme encapsulated in the Deliverable 4.1, entitled Operational requirements for the services in the EOSC catalogue.

A task force of EOSC-hub is currently active to define technical, operational, legal and financial conditions for service providers to offer services through the Hub. They have to take into account different perspectives, for example technical, operational, legal and financial:

• Operational rules defining Service Management requirements.
• Technical rules defining functional and interoperability requirements
• Legal and financial rules: defining compliance requirements (e.g. GDPR) and sustainability/continuity requirements.

Level of integration

In a nutshell, EOSC-hub recommends the following operational requirements and recommendations to be adopted by EOSC-hub’s services and service providers from e-Infrastructures and research infrastructures. If positively evaluated these will be available for implementation in the wider EOSC context.

EOSC-hub proposes to divide services in two main classes:

• Access-enabling services: the services needed to operate the EOSC itself (internal catalogue). These include all federation-level services (for example: Accounting and Monitoring, the Helpdesk, Configuration Management) that provide the foundation for all researcher-facing services. Services in this class cannot be ordered, as such by users.
• Research-enabling services: services offered to users and research communities by means of a Marketplace (external catalogue). These can be further divided into:
  
  • common services, which can be re-used by other services (e.g. compute, storage and data management services), and
  • other researchers-enabling services (e.g. a scientific application offered by a Research Infrastructure)

Given the past experience of the EOSC-hub partners and the project’s early findings, EOSC-hub foresees the need to support different levels of service management integration, according to the specification of each class.

EOSC-hub proposes three different levels of operational levels of integration:

• High integration: for services operated according to the EOSC service management system. The service provider actively participates to the Operations Coordination.
• Medium integration: for services that run with a more mature Service Management Framework
• Low integration: for services run with a less mature Service Management Framework

These three integration levels map to the services classes as follows:

Maturity Level

Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is a gauge for the maturity of a technology.   Originally developed for the space industry by NASA, it became later adopted by various departments of defence around the world and by others.

The TRL scale includes nine levels of maturity:

• TRL 1 Basic principles observed
• TRL 2 Technology concept formulated
• TRL 3 Experimental proof of concept
• TRL 4 Technology validated in lab
• TRL 5 Technology validated in relevant environment
• TRL 6 Technology demonstrated in relevant environment
• TRL 7 System prototype demonstration in operational environment
• TRL 8 System complete and qualified
• TRL 9 Actual system proven in operational environment

The EOSC-hub service catalogue is restricted to services with TRL 8 and 9 – these are the services considered mature enough to be at production level.

Our contribution to the consultation recommends that in EOSC TRL8 remains the minimal requirement. Services with TRL 8 and 9 have passed through the previous development states of proof-of-concept, pilot and pre-production, and will have successfully proven to users that the services are mature and fit-for-purpose for their target communities.

More information

• EOSC-hub contribution to the open consultation on Rules of Participation (full text)
• EOSC-hub Deliverable 4.1: Operational requirements for the services in the EOSC catalogue

Tiziana Ferrari is the Project Coordinator of EOSC-hub and Technical Director of the EGI Foundation. 

Follow Tiziana on Twitter: @tferrariEGI