Demonstrating EOSC-Nordic

Cecilie Maagaard Winther

28.05.2020

Currently there are 10 use cases in the EOSC-Nordic project. All different and from 5 different fields. Learn more about the use cases and what they are demonstrating.

As an EU-project a lot of EOSC-Nordic happens on a governance and strategic level. Policies are being investigated, rules and guidelines thought out, surveys performed and webinars planned. But the project is also working closely with scientist trying to make or utilise what is to be the European Open Science Cloud.

In the EOSC-Nordic there are currently 10 use cases, demonstrators or pilot projects, as they are also called. It is 10 projects from 5 different scientific fields.

The idea of the use cases

The demonstrators have been selected to ensure representation from different disciplines and have been designed to foster interdisciplinary exchange. The use cases will demonstrate how to support cross border research collaboration, using the Nordic and Baltic countries as a testbed environment.

Furthermore, the approaches used in the demonstrators will leverage existing services and will be applicable in environments employing EOSC services outside of the Nordics.

In the Grant Agreement approved by the European Commission it states that:

“The ultimate objective is to demonstrate how thematic portals can concretely build on distributed data and computing resources offered by EOSC to scale out their storage and computing environment.”

The use cases in the EOSC-Nordic are the following:

Archaeology use case

Goal: The plan is to integrate the two national databases, the Danish “Fund og Fortidsminder” and the Norwegian “Askeladden”. By integrating the respective national databases, scientists can search both countries’ archaeological finds from the Viking age simultaneously.

“The Vikings were widespread with a widespread common material culture. So, if we find a tortoise brooch in the ground here in Denmark, well then, we can find something similar in Norway. It makes sense from the researcher’s point of view to have a common search interface,” explains Jens-Bjørn Riis Andresen, Associate professor at Aarhus University, School of Culture and Society at the Department of Archeology and Heritage Studies at the Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus.

He is collaborating with Senior Engineer Espen Uleberg from the University of Oslo, who is also Database Administrator at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and responsible for the Norwegian database.

The use case just reached its first milestone, as the other collaborating partner Deutsche Klimarechenzentrum (DKZ) in Hamburg have harvested all the data and made it available through the interdisciplinary service B2FIND. There are now 205.935 Danish archaeological data sets available via B2FIND.

Natural Language Processing Lab for the Nordics

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is what happens when Siri, Alexa and Google Translate understand human or so-called “natural” language instead of formal or programming languages. NLP technology is a subdiscipline of artificial intelligence which means it is very data and computing heavy.

Goal: The NLP use case in EOSC-Nordic aims to make NLP research in Scandinavia more competitive in computational scale. Among other things the scientists are building a shared, uniform, virtual laboratory for large-scale experimental research in natural language processing.

“We want to enable our doctoral students and master’s students and also researchers on funded research projects to carry out computational experiments that are very resource-demanding. They need much bigger computers, than what are typically available through a local university’s computing infrastructure. And this use case in EOSC-Nordic is paving the road to make Nordic NLP researchers more efficient users of these large-scale national e-infrastructures,” says Stephan Oepen, professor of Machine Learning, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

He is working on this project along colleague Jörg Tiedemann, professor of Language Technology, from the University of Helsinki. Jointly, they represent the larger community, with university research groups in NLP in 4 countries that have collaborated for years.

The NLPL collaboration is comprised of Nordic research groups in NLP and the national e-infrastructure providers of Finland and Norway: Helsinki University (Finland), IT University Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of Oslo (Norway), Turku University (Finland), and Uppsala University (Sweden) are the academic partners.

Climate 1 – Reproducible ecosystem models

Goal: This use case aims to integrate actual data and empirical knowledge in model development and operation so as to better take into account typical ecosystems only found at high latitudes, which are currently poorly represented.