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In den „Orientations towards the first Strategic Plan for Horizon Europe“, dem Stategiepapier der EU-Kommission zum 9. EU-Forschungsrahmenprogramm findet sich zur Bedeutung von Open Science der folgende Satz: „Open science practices will be mainstreamed as the new modus operandi for EU research and innovation.“ Open Science wird die Vorgabe, wie Forschung zukünftig mit Hilfe von digitalen Werkzeugen und Netzwerken getätigt werden soll. Die EU-Kommission ist hier zwar Vorreiter, lokale Fördergeber folgen dem Beispiel allerdings bereits. Für Forschungseinrichtungen bedeutet dies, dass die institutionelle Forschungsinfrastruktur weiterentwickelt werden muss um diesen Vorgaben zu genügen. Im Projekt „e-Infrastructures Austria Plus“ wurden in sieben Arbeitspaketen damit begonnen Know-How und technische Infrastrukturen aufzubauen, die dafür benötigt werden.

Text mining involves a set of processes that analyze text to extract high-quality information. Among its large number of applications, there are experiments that tackle big data challenges using complex system architectures. However, text mining approaches are neither easy to discover and use nor easily combinable by end-users. Furthermore, they should be contextualized within new approaches to science (eg, Open Science) that ensure longevity and reuse of methods and results. This article presents NLPHub, a distributed system that orchestrates and combines several state-of-the-art text mining services that recognize spatiotemporal events, keywords, and a large set of named entities. NLPHub adopts an Open Science approach, which fosters the reproducibility, repeatability, and reusability of methods and results, by using an e-Infrastructure supporting data-intensive Science.NLPHubaddsOpenScience-compliance to the connected services through the use of representational standards for services and computations. It also manages heterogeneous service access policies and enables collaboration and sharing facilities. This article reports a performance assessment based on an annotated corpus of named entities, which demonstrates that NLPHub can improve the performance of the single-integrated processes by cleverly combining their output.

The main aim of the development of a Spanish Network of Excellence on Biodiversity is to strengthen the Spanish Scientific Network Community participating in LifeWatch, the E-Science European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research ERIC (https://www.lifewatch.eu). Through this e-infrastructure several resources and services are provided to the scientific community working on this field (catalogues of virtual labs (VREs), data and services) (https://www.lifewatch.eu/web/guest/catalogue-of-virtual-labs). The LifeWatch ERIC Statutes foresee the creation of National Nodes, which in Spain has been translated into the creation of the Joint Research Unit LifeWatch Spain (JRU - LW.ES) in 2014. This brings together several organizations and institutions carrying out research, development and innovation (RDI) activities in this field. Among others, to date the JRU - LW.ES counts on the participation of Public Research Organizations (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT), The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO), National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA)); International Excellence Campus & Universities (ANDALUCIA TECH Universities of Seville and Málaga, Universities of Cantabria, Navarra, Extremadura, Granada, Huelva, Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Pablo de Olavide); Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing, Food and Environment (Spanish Inventory for Natural and Biodiversity Heritage, Fundación Biodiversidad, Directorate-General for Water-River Basin Authorities, Green Infrastructure); Technology and Innovation Parks-Institutions (Andalusica Technological Park (PTA), Cartuja93, Technological Institute Galicia (ITG)); Regional and Local Authorities (Junta Andalucía), and Port Authorities (Cartagena, Huelva, Seville). These organizations have expressed their interest in integrating into a network of excellence to promote biodiversity research, addressing major environmental challenges, and supporting knowledge-based strategic solutions for environmental preservation. This scientific network, associated with the e-infrastructure LifeWatch ERIC, aims to bring together the critical mass of resources and experience in the field of biodiversity present within Spain, taking advantage of the information and communication technology (ICT) tools and facilities that offer the necessary infrastructure, operating in synergy with national research plans. In essence, the creation of this network aims to consolidate a focus of excellence in Spain in the field of biodiversity, promoting the implementation of joint European projects and contributing to the objectives set in the LifeWatch ERIC.

Sets of two dimensional images are insufficient to capture the development in time and space of three-dimensional structures. The 2D 'flattening' of photographs results in a significant loss of features especially if the photos were taken by one person. Automatically collecting and aligning photos in order to render 3D structures from 2D images without specialized equipment, is currently a complex process that requires specialist knowledge with often limited results. In this paper, an Open Science oriented workflow is proposed where an on-line file system is used to share photos of an object or an environment and to produce a virtual reality scene as a navigable 3D reconstruction that can be shared with other people. Our workflow is based on a distributed e-Infrastructure and overcomes common limitations of other approaches by having all the used technology integrated on the same platform and by not requiring specialist knowledge. A performance evaluation of the 3D reconstruction process embedded in the workflow is reported against a commercial software and an open-source software in terms of computational efficiency and reconstruction accuracy, and three marine science use cases are reported to show potential applications of the workflow.

The work outlines the development of a data curation and data provenance framework in the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure. Practical use cases are described, as well as results of defining and implementing data curation policies and data provenance patterns.

Urgent computing enables responsible authorities to make educated decisions by supporting the computations of simulated predictions of time critical events. Unfortunately, most domains of science cannot afford dedicated resources for their urgent computing problems. As a solution, exploiting existing e-Infrastructures is invaluable for many problems if the wide array of available resources in today's e-Infrastructures can be utilised. In this paper, we focus on rarely occurring events that are best suited for urgent computations on existing HPC, Grid and Cloud e-Infrastructures. Since e-Infrastructures are meant to serve more than just one community of users, they have inherent characteristics that have to be modified or adapted in order to enable them effectively for urgent computing. We hope to demonstrate that there are many existing and on-going developments that can be leveraged to prepare existing e-Infrastructures for urgent computing.

CHAIN-REDS, an EU co-funded project, focuses on promoting and supporting technological and scientific collaboration across different e-Infrastructures established and operated in various continents. The project implemented a Regional Operations Centre (ROC) model for enabling Grid computing interoperation across continents, and an operational ROC has been set up for Africa. Moreover, the project operates a global Cloud federation test-bed, where also nascent African Cloud sites contribute. Finally, the project is supporting a real-life use-case from Africa that of APHRC, using its data e-Infrastructure services.

This is an open-access article.-- et al., With the increasingly rapid growth of data in life sciences we are witnessing a major transition in the way research is conducted, from hypothesis-driven studies to data-driven simulations of whole systems. Such approaches necessitate the use of large-scale computational resources and e-infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). EGI, one of key the enablers of the digital European Research Area, is a federation of resource providers set up to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners. Here we aim to provide the state of the art of Grid/Cloud computing in EU research as viewed from within the field of life sciences, focusing on key infrastructures and projects within the life sciences community. Rather than focusing purely on the technical aspects underlying the currently provided solutions, we outline the design aspects and key characteristics that can be identified across major research approaches. Overall, we aim to provide significant insights into the road ahead by establishing ever-strengthening connections between EGI as a whole and the life sciences community., AD was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal (SFRH/BPD/78075/2011 and EXPL/BBBBEP/1356/2013). FP has been supported by the National Grid Infrastructure NGI_GRNET, HellasGRID, as part of the EGI. IFB acknowledges funding from the “National Infrastructures in Biology and Health” call of the French “Investments for the Future” initiative. The WeNMR project has been funded by a European FP7 e-Infrastructure grant, contract no. 261572. AF was supported by a grant from Labex CEBA (Centre d’études de la Biodiversité Amazonienne) from ANR. MC is supported by UK’s BBSRC core funding. CSC was supported by Academy of Finland grant No. 273655 for ELIXIR Finland. The EGI-InSPIRE project (Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe) is co-funded by the European Commission (contract number: RI-261323). The BioMedBridges project is funded by the European Commission within Research Infrastructures of the FP7 Capacities Specific Programme, grant agreement number 284209.

Part 8: High Performance Computing and BigData; International audience; National e-Infrastructures are playing an increasingly important role in the support of complex computational and data requirements from all scientific disciplines, environmental informatics not excepting. Since 1996, such an e-Infrastructure is developed and operated in the Czech Republic, with its emphasis shifting from a shared uniform distributed infrastructure to a more user-tailored environment. Its development relates (and in some cases precedes) the evolution of European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), with its current vision of an Open Science Commons concept. While the current e-Infrastructure concept and its implementation is of a very generic nature, it can be tailored to specifically cover different needs of environmental applications. This paper gives an overview of the Czech national e-Infrastructure, its connection to EGI and a number of applications from environmental science domains.

International audience; Geothermal data are published using different IT services, formats and content representations, and can refer to both regional and global scale information. Geothermal stakeholders search for information with different aims. E-Infrastructures are collaborative platforms that address this diversity of aims and data representations. In this paper, we present a prototype for a European Geothermal Information Platform that uses INSPIRE recommendations and an e-Infrastructure (D4Science) to collect, aggregate and share data sets from different European data contributors, thus enabling stakeholders to retrieve and process a large amount of data. Our system merges segmented and national realities into one common framework. We demonstrate our approach by describing a platform that collects data from Italian, French, Hungarian, Swiss and Icelandic geothermal data providers.

This paper outlines the efforts of the OpenAIRE networking team to establish a Europe-wide open access initiative. OpenAIRE is an effort to realize the open access policies of the European Commission, and has built an infrastructure to support the widest possible dissemination of project results within a certain funding area, FP7. The purpose of the paper is to highlight how such a service can be established through the work of a successful network of European open access contacts and by effective communication with a range of stakeholders. The paper also outlines the flexible technical infrastructure and research activities within the project. Not without its challenges, the approach to tackling existing barriers, such as building repository interoperability, are explored. The paper also introduces the aims and initial activities of the continuation project, OpenAIREplus.

Support systems play an important role for the communication between users and developers of software. We studied two support systems, an issues tracker and an email service available for Scratchpads, a Web 2.0 social networking tool that enables communities to build, share, manage and publish biodiversity information on the Web. Our aim was to identify co-learning opportunities between users and developers of the Scratchpad system by asking which support system was used by whom and for what type of questions. Our results show that issues tracker and emails cater to different user mentalities as well as different kind of questions and suggest ways to improve the support system as part of the development under the EU funded ViBRANT programme. © Irina Brake et al.

EU-IndiaGrid2 - Sustainable e-infrastructures across Europe and India – is a project funded by European Commission under the Research Infrastructure Programme of the Information and Society Directorate General with the specific aim of promoting international interoperation between European and Indian e-Infrastructures. 2010 has been an eventful year for e-Infrastructures across Europe and India with a number of important achievements. EU-Indiagrid2, basing on the achievements of the previous EU-IndiaGrid project and on the active role of its partners was at the core of all these events that contributed significantly to the project progress towards its objectives. The present article reviews the most recent e-Infrastructures developments in India and their relationship with respect to Europe and the Asia-Pacific area.