Content about Research

Sergio Andreozzi outlines EGI’s vision for the Open Science Commons. He argues that this new approach to governing shared scientific resources has the potential to help to shape research policies and maximize scientific outputs.

The European CHAIN-REDS project, which ran for 30 months starting in December 2012, worked to promote and support technological and scientific collaboration across e-infrastructures established and operated in different continents, in order to define a path towards a global e-infrastructure ecosystem. The CHAIN-REDS vision is that this ecosystem will enable virtual research communities, research groups, and even individual researchers to access and efficiently use worldwide distributed resources (e.g., computing, storage, data, services, tools, and applications). A booklet published last month gives an overview of the project’s success in facilitating this ambitious vision and assesses the project’s global impact.

The GÉANT TIC (Trust and Identity Committee) and Internet2 TIER (Trust and Identity for Education and Research) initiatives met at a workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, on 3-4 February to discuss the status and future of US-EU collaboration on trust and identity technology, policy, and federation efforts.

Last month, iSGTW attended the EUDAT Third Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. EUDAT is facilitating efficient research by contributing towards a collaborative data infrastructure in Europe. This will enable researchers to share data easily both within and between communities. It will also facilitate preservation of research data.

"The longer we wait, the more complex it becomes to solve the challenges around building the collaborative data infrastructure," says Kimmo Koski, managing director of Finland’s IT Center for Science (CSC), which is the organization coordinating the EUDAT project. "The time has come to do this now: Today’s global economic situation highlights the need for broad collaboration to solve these challenges."

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) seeks to build the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing and reuse of data, so as to address the cross-border and cross-disciplinary challenges faced by researchers. This September, the RDA will be hosting its Fourth Plenary Meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Ahead of the event, iSGTW speaks to Gary Berg-Cross, general secretary of the Spatial Ontology Community of Practice and a member of the US RDA advisory committee. Berg-Cross is also co-chair of the RDA working group on data foundation and terminology.

Extreme science continues to advance, making increased computational resources critical to ongoing discovery. The role of exascale systems in this advancement remains a question, as does the US role in moving exascale forward.

The popular file-sharing tool comes to Europe with a new site aimed at fulfilling the specific needs of EU-based researchers.