Joint Service Catalogue for Research

Overview:

Research is becoming more global and increasingly dependent on the availability of high-quality and innovative digital services and resources to be combined in order to support collaboration and data-/compute-intensive activities. Many digital services for research are available from publicly-funded e-Infrastructures supported by National or European funding, others are being offered by commercial providers. Understanding what is available and how this can best meet the specific needs is a time consuming activity, especially if information are spread across many sources. On the other hand, policy makers and funding agencies have also the need to improve the visibility of the services that they support, facilitate their discovery by the researchers, understand the uptake and impact.

The availability of a joint service catalogue would address the aforementioned aspects. Several e-infrastructure providers have already started to work on this topic and initial results were presented at the EGI conference in April 2016 together with best practices on how to manage service portfolios according to the FitSM standard. The initiatives who contributed to this work are: EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, OpenAIRE, BlueBRIDGE and the THOR project.

The goal of this session is update the community on the results of this effort and to share the experience in using the agreed definition for a joint catalogue of services. The session will offer also the opportunity to the representative of the eInfraCentral project to describe the main goals of the project and how synergies can be created with this work. A panel discussion will offer the opportunity to the audience to address the solution providers with key questions to shape the way forward. 

Session Schedule

• Introduction: (Sergio Andreozzi - Chair, EGI Foundation) - 5'
   
• Why a joint service catalogue for research: the EC viewpoint (Enrique Gomez, Unit eInfrastructure & Science Cloud, DG CONNECT, EC) - 5'
   
• Initial experience in creating a Joint Service Catalogue for e-Infrastructure services (Angela Dappert, British Library/THOR Project) - 15'
  In the first part of 2016, representatives of EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, OpenAIRE, BlueBRIDGE and the THOR project formed a group to share current practices around service portfolio management and to discuss how to harmonise them towards the creation of a joint service catalogue. The group discussed the initial results of this work at the EGI conference in April 2016 together with best practices on how to manage service portfolios according to the FitSM standard.
   
• MERIL portal: experience in data modeling and future plans (Julija Baginskaite, European Science Foundation) - 15'
  MERIL is a portal that provides a comprehensive mapping of European openly accessible research infrastructures ‘of More than National Relevance’. The goal of the portal is to serve policy maker needs by providing data on RIs across European countries and scientific disciplines and by offering data and tools for RI landscape and gap analysis, benchmarking. As the portal is going through a major revision, the goal of the presentation is to present the future directions to identify possible synergies with the work on a common joint service catalogue for research. 
   
• eInfraCentral: Goals and vision for a joint service catalogue (Alasdair Reid, EFIS) - 15'
  eInfraCentral is a new H2020 funded project with the mission of: 1) ensuring that, by 2020 a broader and more varied set of users (including industry) discovers and accesses the existing and developing e-infrastructure capacity; 2) identify a common approach to defining and monitoring e-infrastructures services will increase the uptake of and enhance understanding of where improvements can be made in delivering e-infrastructure services. The projec will start in the last quarter of 2016 for a duration of 30 months. The presentation will give an initial overview of the project.
    
• Panel discussion - 30'
  Panelists:
  1. EC: Enrique Gomez, Project Officer, Unit C.1 DG CONNECT
  2. EGI: Sy Holsinger, Senior Strategy and Policy Officer, EGI Foundation
  3. eInfraCentral project: Alasdair Reid, Principal Researcher & Policy Director, European Future Innovation System Centre (EFIS)
  4. EUDAT: Rob Baxter, Software Development Group Manager, EPCC - University of Edinburgh
  5. GEANT: Matthew Scott, Chief Programmes Officer, GEANT
  6. MERIL portal: Julija Baginskaite, Science and Data Officer – MERIL Team, European Science Foundation
  7. OpenAIRE: Paolo Manghi, Technical Manager OpenAIRE2020 and Researcher at ISTI - CNR 
  8. PRACE: Giovanni Erbacci, Technical board member and operational services coordinator for PRACE,
  9. THOR Project: Angela Dappert, Project Manager for the EU-funded THOR project
      
• Conclusion and summary - 5'

The final outcome will be a set of recommendations to help shaping the progress of the future activity in this area.

Resources:

e­-Infrastructure Catalogue of Services - draft data model (click here to view PDF file)

Target Audience:

The target audience is service designers involved in developing IT solutions for research communities, service portfolio managers of e-Infrastructures and policy makers interested in improving visibility of the services they fund.

Benefits for Audience:

- Learn about the initiative for a joint catalogue of services for research

- Provide feedback on the current experience or unmet need

- Share views from different stakeholders

- Influence the direction moving forward

Topic 2: Services enabling research