Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Integrating and managing services for the European Open Science Cloud

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EOSC-hub (Integrating and managing services for the European Open Science Cloud)

Reporting period: 2019-07-01 to 2021-03-31

The EOSC-hub project contributes to the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud, the federated infrastructure and supporting initiative providing all researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with seamless access to an open-by-default, efficient and cross-disciplinary environment for storing, accessing, reusing data, tools, publications and other scientific outputs for research, innovation and educational purposes.

The project simplifies access to a broad portfolio of products, resources and services provided by the major pan-European and international organizations through an open and integrated service catalogue. It contributed the EOSC Portal and Marketplace development and delivery realising the EOSC Portal as a European-level common discovery and access channel. EOSC-hub also enhances and delivers services through the 'Hub' and thematic data and tools. These are exposed in the catalogue of the EOSC Portal, which aggregates services from local, regional and national e-Infrastructures in Europe and worldwide. The EOSC Portal acts as a single contact point for researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research.

EOSC-hub removes fragmentation of service provisioning and access to high-quality digital services in Europe and beyond through the technical integration and adoption of standards for interoperability of compute, storage, data and software platforms. It realizes this through an integration and management system that delivers a catalogue of services, software and data from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and major research e-infrastructures. This integration and management system builds on mature processes, policies and tools from the leading European federated e-Infrastructures to cover the whole life-cycle of services, from planning to delivery.

The project also consolidates e-Infrastructures by expanding capacity and capabilities and improving service quality, and improves skills and knowledge among researchers and service operators by delivering specialised trainings and by establishing competence centres to co-create solutions with the users. Furthermore, the project operated a Digital Innovation Hub that stimulates an ecosystem of industry/SMEs, service providers and researchers to support business pilots and market take-up. Thanks to targeted demand-side support activities that include EOSC Competence Centres and the EOSC Early Adopter Programme, EOSC-hub widens the access to services to all user groups including researchers, high-education, business organizations and expand the user base.
EOSC-hub was the first major implementation project building the EOSC Core. It significantly contributed to the shaping of the portfolio, the technical architecture, the interoperability standards, the modelling of the Minimum Viable EOSC (European Open Science Cloud), the Rules of Participation. It also dedicates significant efforts to support the EOSC demand side focusing on multiple target groups.

The project was one of the most significant contributors to the development and operations of the EOSC Portal concept and its implementation, evolving it into a European-level common discovery and access channel, which currently comprises +280 services, and delivered additional functionality including the helpdesk, an order management tool, a configuration management database and a metric portal. With these capabilities the project lays the foundation of the EOSC Core and related service provisioning processes and policies. The project also contributed to the constitution of a joint team that takes care of service onboarding, the ‘EOSC portal Onboarding Team’.

The service portfolio model with the internal and external portfolio was successfully adopted in EOSC, specifically the model was reflected in the separation of federating services of the EOSC Core from end-user services that are part of the EOSC Exchange. The project significantly contributed to the implementation of the portfolio itself by integrating services from research communities and e-Infrastructures: EGI, EUDAT and Indigo DataCloud.

The EOSC technical implementation was supported by the EOSC-hub technical framework that includes 18 different architecture and interoperability guidelines. These were adopted to deliver 40 technical integrations.

The growth of the EOSC demand side was achieved through different channels and support measures: the EOSC Portal marketplace platform, webinars, training and support resources, the Early Adopter Programme and the EOSC Digital Innovation Hub. 13 pilots were selected spanning several scientific disciplines: agriculture, marine, material sciences, disaster mitigation, health science, biology, astronomy, light pollution and etc. The pilots completed 25 integrations of 9 different services. More than 200 training events were organised with +5000 trained people and +350 training modules.
EOSC-hub delivered 9 key exploitable results that contribute to the main four EOSC implementation areas: (1) Support, (2) Interoperability, (3) EOSC Core and (4) EOSC Exchange.

Area 1: Support actions
- The EOSC Digital Innovation Hub provides a clear interface for commercial innovation. In addition, the EOSC Early Adopter Programme offers integrated consultancy to research communities.
- The Training Courses and Materials encompass a large variety of project results such as common and federated services for supporting the whole research life cycle, fostering the use of digital infrastructures and promoting the uptake of Open Science paradigm.
- The Business and Sustainability models are crucial for long-term planning of EOSC. EOSC-hub provided a definition for the planned “EOSC Federating Core”, including a cost assessment and a business plan.

Area 2: Interoperability guidelines
Interoperability and Integration Guidelines piloted the definition of the high-level architecture for basic EOSC technical functions and promoting EOSC standards and APIs.

Area 3: EOSC Core
- The EOSC Portal and Marketplace support the service discovery and access in EOSC. This KER includes technical components, intangible assets and contractual arrangements that make it possible to provide the service that facilitates the access and use of the EOSC assets.
- The Internal Services provide the basic enabling services proposed for accessing and operating the EOSC. Some examples of these internal services include access control or accounting as well as common and standard interfaces to shared tools for basic services that need to be aligned in order to provide consistent user experiences. Internal services in the Hub Portfolio are one of the key elements foreseen for the EOSC federating core.
- EOSC-hub defined and piloted an IT service management system (ITSM) for EOSC. This system will allow service providers to plan, deliver, operate and control services offered to customers or the future EOSC users.
- EOSC-hub developed a comprehensive and coherent set of rules and policies for service providers to onboard services and make them discoverable and accessible through the EOSC Portal.

Area 4: EOSC Exchange
Thanks to EGI, EUDAT and Indigo DataCloud, EOSC-hub provided compute, storage facilities, federated data and compute management, and federated AAI services as horizontal platforms for data exploitation.
EOSC-hub key exploitable results