Evaluation of e-Infrastructures and the development of related Key Performance Indicators

National Funders and the European Commission are funding the development and the operation of project-specific as well as general-purpose e-Infrastructures to provide services and facilities to research communities. In its White Paper 2013 e-IRG has introduced the e-Infrastructure Commons for knowledge, science and innovation. This e-Infrastructure Commons is an integrated living ecosystem of resources and services that should be open, user-friendly and accessible to European researchers and scientists, continuously adapting to the changing requirements of research and to the opportunities of new technologies. Moreover, the recent discussions on a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) have re-framed and emphasized this ecosystem of services. It challenges the e- Infrastructure (service) providers in all their diversity, computing/storage/networking and publicly/commercially funded, to position themselves in this EOSC. The recent discussions on the EOSC have emphasised the need to assess and classify the value of the various e-Infrastructures, at pan-European as well as at the regional and national levels.

Following this vision of an integrated ecosystem, the various stakeholders are keen to understand how to assess the use, operation and innovation of e-Infrastructures in Europe and thus the efficiency of e.g. their investment strategies, based on common metrics and measures. As such, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are intended to provide a means for an operational, technical and socio-economic impact assessment of e-Infrastructures and the services they provide.