EOSC and Beyond: LifeWatch ERIC at the project’s kickoff meeting to accelerate research applications
The EOSC Beyond kickoff meeting occurred on April 17, marking the beginning of an initiative to improve the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by providing new foundational technical solutions. The outputs will enable developers of scientific application environments to leverage EOSC resources and present them as integrated functionalities to researchers. The ultimate goal is to increase the number of integrated providers and active users of EOSC.
As a candidate EOSC node, LifeWatch ERIC – represented by Nicola Fiore, Service Centre ICT Coordinator – participated in the meeting by presenting services like the Metadata Catalogue and LifeBlock, particularly relevant to scientists in biodiversity and ecosystems. EOSC nodes operate at different levels to fulfil specific scientific missions, such as accelerating scientific applications, enabling Open Science, promoting innovation, and aligning EOSC architecture with European data spaces.
LifeWatch ERIC’s Metadata Catalogue is built on comprehensive standards to make digital objects (datasets, services, workflows, VREs, etc…) FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). This tool enables scientists and researchers worldwide to discover, access and use digital objects, services and resources from various repositories to tackle pressing scientific questions for biodiversity and ecosystem research. Similarly, LifeBlock is a blockchain-based platform that stores and manages biodiversity and ecosystem data. It ensures data integrity, provenance, and traceability while offering the possibility of retrieving data from multiple research infrastructures.
The goals of EOSC Beyond focus on accelerating the development of new scientific applications like the Metadata Catalogue and LifeBlock and fostering innovation within EOSC through testing and integration environments. It will also align EOSC Core architecture and specifications with European data spaces. The project aims to achieve these goals using co-design methodologies that involve collaborating with various national and regional initiatives to address their use cases. To learn more about EOSC Beyond, please visit this page: https://eosc.eu/eu-project/eosc-beyond/