The European Digital Twin Ocean (EU DTO) initiative, announced by President von der Leyen, aims to harness digital technology to provide comprehensive knowledge of the ocean. The European Digital Twin of the Ocean seeks to provide an innovative set of user-driven, interactive and decision-making tools backed by the best science and data. Its core development is underway with the European Union (EU) funding through the European Digital Twin Ocean (EDITO) R&D projects. Two sister projects, namely EDITO-Infra and EDITO-Model Lab, are building the operational backbone infrastructure of the European Digital Twin Ocean. Key components of the EDITO approach include a Data Lake, Processing Engine, and Virtual Simulation Environment. EDITO aims to integrate and expand existing European assets and capabilities, starting with the Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data and services, to develop the EU Public Infrastructure for the EU DTO. The vision is to widen the engagement to additional projects and infrastructures that can contribute with complementary data, services, algorithms, and computing resources. From that perspective, EDITO is considering engagement through projects such as ILIAD and Blue-Cloud 2026 and several other EU research projects and e-infrastructures, such as EuroHPC. The plan is also to integrate EDITO with Destination Earth (DestinE), the European Commission's flagship initiative for a sustainable future.

The DTO Task Force in Blue-Cloud 2026 has been set up to ensure the complementarity of Blue-Cloud 2026 with ongoing Digital Ocean initiatives. Therefore, the Blue-Cloud DTO Task Force seeks to identify complementary data resources and analytical services which Blue-Cloud could contribute to the EU DTO data lake and applications portfolio. To be able to deliver these on an operational basis, the Blue-Cloud DTO Task Force aims to promote and elaborate technical synergies and interoperability between EDITO and the Blue-Cloud architectures, data and services.

The Task Force's activities began with a presentation and short discussion at the Blue-Cloud 2026 Kick-Off meeting, where the EDITO initiative was introduced. This was followed by a dedicated workshop between managers and developers of the Blue-Cloud 2026, EDITO-Infra and EDITO-Modellab projects. The presentations and discussions created a level playing field and gave the early impression that the technologies in use in Blue-Cloud and EDITO are already quite aligned. Areas of potential collaboration were identified, and for the short term, a plan was made to demonstrate synergy between Blue-Cloud 2026 and EDITO at the upcoming Digital Ocean Forum 2024 (DOF 2024) in June 2024 by deploying a copy of a successful Blue-Cloud VLab at the EDITO infrastructure. In the meantime, this plan has been accepted by the DOF 2024 organisers, including EU DG RTD and DG MARE, and technical activities have started to roll out this plan. For the longer term, more structural cooperation and connectivity will be desired as Blue-Cloud is developing and delivering an increasing portfolio of Virtual Labs with potential for use in the EU DTO context while also building an interesting data provision through a federation of multiple leading data repositories and deploying fast performing data lakes with high-quality data and data products, which might complement the core data offer for EDITO from Copernicus Marine and EMODnet. Therefore, ongoing dialogue and technical exchanges are required to identify in more detail the added value that Blue-Cloud 2026 could offer to the EU DTO data and services portfolio and to elaborate on how smart connectivity could be established between the Blue-Cloud digital ecosystem and the EDITO infrastructure to achieve a dynamic exchange. These discussions and analyses should become part of a roadmap for co-construction between Blue-Cloud 2026 and EDITO, which could then be proposed to the EU DTO management team.