EOSC for Nordic-Baltic Researchers and Service Providers

The last session of the day was dedicated to presenting how EOSC-Nordic has supported the research community in the region.

In this sense, the EOSC-Nordic approach is clear: making consumable services more mature and usable. Since the beginning of the project, the team has been working on establishing interoperability efforts in making services in different countries more similar to each other, and tailoring them to the research community.

 

Interoperability and maturity – customer perspective, Ilja Livenson, UT/ETAIS

Ilja Livenson, from the UT/ETAIS, explained that the EOSC-Nordic has established a maturity model to assess the status of the services provided, which includes: service management, data management and FAIR data requirements, accessibility and legal requirements, sustainability and EOSC architecture compatibility. During the presentation, Ilja Livenson pointed out that this maturity system ensures that services are predictable and reliable.

 

Image: Ilja Livenson. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

The presentation available in the Knowledge Hub

 

Motivation and mandate – getting service providers on board the EOSC Portal, Emma-Lisa Hansson, SNIC

On her side, Emma-Lisa Hansson, from the SNIC, explained the work done by the project to identify existing Nordic generic and thematic service providers and support their integration and the discovery of their services via the EOSC portal and other relevant catalogues. In addition to that, several activities were dedicated to fostering the organisational semantic and technical interoperability of service providers and to proposing solutions for improving the interoperability approach within EOSC.

The experience of the team working with service providers showed two interesting findings. First, IPR standards were badly addressed by a number of services. The team attributed that to the lack of IPR knowledge among scientists and service providers as well as a lack of interest in IPR matters. As the importance of legal compliance is growing, there might be a need for guidelines with concrete explanations and good examples to raise awareness about IPR matters.

The second finding is that interoperability issues, although they are usually complex and require considerations from different viewpoints, were not a big problem for service providers. In fact, despite the complexities, the service providers demonstrated a high degree of awareness, insight, and responsiveness to the interoperability issues.

As a conclusion on how to move forward, she considered that a possible objective for EOSC in the future would be to assist the service providers in their journey to new maturity levels. In her view, assistance could consist of guides on best practices or holding discussions on how to improve the services, among others Overall, these measures would enhance the EOSC network and the onboarding process of services.

 

Image: Emma-Lisa Hansson. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

The presentation available in the Knowledge Hub

 

Cross-border models

The last sessions under this block were focused on cross-border models for service providers and resource allocation: the LUMI model and the NEIC project.

 

Cross-border HPC: EuroHPC LUMI as a model for EOSC, Ilja Livenson, UT/ETAIS

Ilja Livenson, from UT/ETAIS, introduced the LUMI model and discussed how the EOSC ecosystem can learn from LUMI and reuse some of its organisational principles. Moreover, Ilja explained the activities done by the project to enable cross-border usage of services. According to him, there are two crucial components for providing services across the border. Firstly, motivation for the service providers to allow access (compensation, sustainability). Secondly, the ability to provide access and services (legal/mandate, procedures).

The new infrastructure capacity provided by LUMI together with its co-financed model creates a strong motivation for service providers to provide shared resources.

 

Image: Ilja Livenson. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

The presentation available in the Knowledge Hub

 

Cross-border resource allocations – challenges and opportunities, Tomasz Malkiewicz

This presentation was followed by the one led by Tomasz Malkiewicz, representing Puhuri, a project part of the NeiC portfolio. The main goal of the project is to allow users seamlessly access to content and services via a common AAI. Puhuri, in conjunction with EOSC Nordic, worked on the improvement of the following aspects: which users access resources; how data can be moved across borders and how national resources can be accessed by international users.

 

Image: Tomasz Malkiewicz. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

The presentation available in the Knowledge Hub

 

Cross-border Computing, Abdulrahman Azab, UiO; Tommi Bergman, Finnish Meteorological Institute; Helmut Neukirchen, University of Iceland

Abdulrahman Azab covered the initial work started in EOSC-Nordic in the sensitive area domain which is now being studied for the LUMI super-computer platform. The work will make use of studies done in EOSC-Nordic to allow remote access to sensitive data. This work has the potential for far-reaching benefits for researchers wishing to combine sensitive data for higher statistics studies.

Image: Abdulrahman Azab. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

 

Tommi Bergman presented work on analysis of data at FMI using a FAIR framework that consisted of a Galaxy portal interfaced to cloud computing and EOSC storage services (B2Drop and B2Share) and the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). All the workflows and code could easily be shared with peers and the computing and analysis was able to run in more than one country.

 

Image: Tommi Bergman. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

 

Helmut Neukirchen described the work that was done to increase the functionality of the existing portals PlutoF and Galaxy for the Biodiversity and Climate communities in EOSC-Nordic. The portals were augmented to allow access to cloud computing resources and object storage in a different country to where the portal was located by including support for robot accounts with auditing and an interface to object storage. The robot accounts act as a proxy for the researcher using the portal.

 

Image: Helmut Neukirchen. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

The presentation available in the Knowledge Hub

 

Cross-border Archeology, Jens-Bjørn Andresen, Aarhus University, Denmark

Jens-Bjorn Andresen gave an example of the work that the metadata harvesting of archaeological data from Denmark and Norway has already enabled.

The North sea in prehistory was a land-mass occupied by prehistoric settlers. The availability of information from different countries in a combined manner has made it possible for ancient settlements to be located in the North Sea allowing wind turbines to be located such that they avoid damaging archaeologically rich locations. Even more interesting projects are being considered based on the availability of the combined datasets. However, there is still more work to do in order to make the combined metadata seamless to use. Ontological mappings of terms used by each country are necessary to fully exploit the metadata.

 

Image: Jens-Bjørn Andresen. Photo by Gertrud Alatare.

The presentation available in the Knowledge Hub