The EPOS Implementation Phase had two main goals: 1) implement the data and service provision in an effective technical, governance, legal and financial framework through the EPOS IP project and 2) establish EPOS ERIC. Both goals have been successfully achieved and the EPOS IP project has actually created the conditions for the EPOS ERIC guidance of the EPOS Delivery Framework.
On October the 30th 2018, the European Commission granted the legal status of ERIC to EPOS. The Consortium, based in Italy, has been established by nine founder countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia and the United Kingdom with Greece, Iceland and Switzerland participating as observers. Poland and Greece have then joined the ERIC as member and Iceland will join in the forthcoming months. More countries are expected to join the ERIC within 2020.
The first three years of the EPOS IP project have been dedicated to implement and validate the data and service provision, while the last year has been dedicated to test pre-operational performances. The central hub of the Integrated Core Services (ICS-C), the novel e-infrastructure for providing integrated access to Data, Data-products, Software and Services (DDSS elements) from different scientific communities federated through the Thematic Core Services (TCS), has been built and the prototype has been validated and tested. Nine TCS will be soon formally established to federate the different scientific communities in EPOS (namely, Seismology, Near-Fault Observatories, GNSS Data and Products, Volcanoes Observations, Satellite Data Products, Geomagnetic Observations, Anthropogenic Hazards, Geological Data and Modeling, Multi-Scale Laboratories). Two further communities are going to enter with the status of “Candidate TCS” with the goal of being federated in EPOS in the near future, namely the Geo-Energy Test Beds and the Tsunami Data and Modeling. The latter is a new community that approached EPOS during the Implementation Phase. The EPOS IP project created the conditions to tackle the sustainability challenge from a technical, legal, governance and financial point of view. This integrated platform composed of the ICS and TCS represents the federated EPOS Delivery Framework.
Currently, 149 research organizations, 256 research infrastructures from 25 countries and 5 international organizations (ORFEUS, EMSC, EUREF, INTERMAGNET, EuroGeoSurveys) are involved in the EPOS Delivery Framework. The community that participated to the EPOS Implementation Phase is relevant with a total of about 1,000 people involved in the project at various levels. These figures guarantee an effective engagement of scientists and a shared approach to data, metadata and service integration.
The EPOS IP project succeeded in developing the “EPOS portfolio” characterizing the data and service provision. Out of 365 DDSS elements proposed for implementation by TCS at the beginning of the project, 221 have been validated and successfully tested at TCS level, representing 61% of the entire portfolio, 186 of which resulted to be successfully tested also at ICS level (84% of validated services). These 186 DDSS elements are interoperable with ICS-C through 281 web-services. The TCS-ICS federated system is the skeleton of the EPOS Delivery Framework and represents the solution for integrating distributed research infrastructures via shared standards for data and metadata, representing a practice for FAIR data management.
