The endeavour of building a research data ecosystem for Europe will not be complete if it fails to address the complex needs of sensitive data.
Much of the data needed for fundamental and policy-relevant research and analysis is highly sensitive. For example, data such as individuals' health and socio-economic status, the habitats of vulnerable species, geo-spatial locations of sensitive sites and sampling of potential pathogen outbreak are critical for research and European preparedness. These data are managed in secure - trusted - research environments (TRE) within the member states. However, the emerging European landscape is fragmented: a common European reference architecture (“blueprint”) that enables connectivity between TREs is missing.
The EOSC-ENTRUST project will create a network of these environments that, via a common blueprint, allows transnational access and analysis of sensitive data in pan-European projects. In addition, EOSC-ENTRUST includes the LUMI and Mare-Nostrum sites of Europe's next-generation exa-scale computers and future AI factories with the ambition to establish how this processing power can be securely used for constructing e.g. advanced artificial intelligence models on sensitive datasets.
EOSC-ENTRUST set out in 2024 with four overarching objectives to address this landscape (1) to create a European network of Trusted Research Environments to enable transnational collaborative research on sensitive or restricted data, (2) Trusted Research Environment providers implement, validate, and promote their capabilities using common standards and shared legal, operational and technical language, (3) national funders and governments understand the network of TRE capabilities serving their needs, and (4) the European Network of Trusted Research Environments is embedded in the European Open Science Cloud and the European Data Spaces and fosters an ecosystem of public, private and joint-venture providers of TRE services.
These objectives align to a single aim; enabling a Europe-wide future-looking capability for research across all types of data, by leveraging the investment and expertise developed at institutional and national level over many years.