Supporting marine data discovery and accessibility to enable cross-domain research

There are several research infrastructures or other data services running in Europe that cover a multitude of marine-related sciences, providing specific datasets coming from observations collected with different methods. These infrastructures constitute a diverse world, each looking at a piece of the big picture. Blue-Cloud aims to overcome fragmentation and create a bridge between thematic science clusters - such as humanities, climate, food and agriculture sciences - and EOSC, creating a data federation and providing a common access to a so-called thematic EOSC for marine data to enhance the visibility and discoverability of data from marine and environmental domains.

To overcome this fragmentation, a dedicated Data Discovery and Access Service (DD&AS) has been implemented. This service facilitates discovery and retrieval of data sets and data products for external users in stand-alone mode, also interoperable with other Blue-Cloud services, such as the Virtual Research Environment (VRE). More than 10 million data sets are managed in blue data infrastructures (BDIs) that are connected to this Blue-Cloud service to serve federated discovery and access. A common interface is provided for discovery and retrieval of data sets and data products from each of the federated BDIs.

The Blue-Cloud VRE is powered by the D4Science Infrastructure. [M. Assante et al. (2019) Enacting open science by D4Science. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 101: 555-563 10.1016/j.future.2019.05.063 ]

The full list of EOSC in practice stories is available here