Europe on Daniele Bailo

European Open Science Cloud (EOSC): Key Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of EU Research

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The EU is ideally positioned to take a global leadership role in the development of a cloud environment for science. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will be the virtual environment where multidisciplinary data, access infrastructures, and computing resources are made available to researchers and private-sector actors.

Europe has long promoted the sharing of scientific research data, which should be remembered as an investment on which national governments and the European Community are spending substantial resources, in the order of billions of euros.

Managing collaborative software developments in International Initiatives: how to optimize resources and time.

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Facing reality

There is a truth that we are all reluctant to admit: many EU funded initiatives in the research domain aim at producing software-related deliverables, but when coming to the real day-to-day work, releasing even small piece of working software is very challenging. Project partners have different approaches, different technical practices, different off-the-shelf software products that need to be harmonized or sometimes divergent ideas and different cultural backgrounds. That’s the beauty and the challenge of EU initiatives. COVID-19 made things even worse by hindering the possibility of having face to face meetings, where - everybody knows but just a few people say it – agreements and decisions are taken in “social” contexts (yes, I mean coffee breaks and working dinners).

The three components to ENVRI-hub success

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Interview with Daniele Bailo, Zhiming Zhao, and Ari Asmi, who explain the key components forming the ENVRI-hub: the ENVRI Catalogue of Services, the ENVRI Knowledge Base, and the ENVRI Use Cases.

Daniele, can you explain in more detail why
these three components are crucial to the ENVRI-hub?

Daniele: These are three distinct but complementary
elements used as containers to support the provision of
heterogeneous datasets, services, and software within
ENVRI.

Enhancing Research Infrastructures with VRE4EIC components: the EPOS success story

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

(This article was originally written for VRE4EIC Newsletter. Follow this link to the original source).

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) highlights how its research infrastructure has become more efficient and user friendly by utilizing technology developed in the frame of the EU H2020 VRE4EIC project.

In the last decades quite an amount of tools, technologies and software has been developed to support and improve research throughout the entire data lifecycle[1]. This includes software, modeling tools, and even code that can be used and re-used by researchers around the world. However, more and more emphasis has been given to the structural components that enable a Research Infrastructure[2] to be sustainable, robust and, even most importantly, compliant to the FAIR principles[3]. Such principles prescribe–in order to enable reproducible science–that data need to be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. It is usually up to research infrastructure designers, developers and managers to find the best architecture and technologies to enable FAIR to become reality in their scientific domain. However, looking transversally at science domains, it is clear that there is a number of challenges common to several communities, as evidenced by the common requirements elicitation and analysis of existing technical assets carried out both in the VRE4EIC and ENVRIplus project[4].

In this framework, VRE4EIC is promoting the adoption of common, standard technical solutions in order to facilitate Research Infrastructures in facing shared challenges and thus complying with FAIR principles.

This is the case of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), a Distributed Research Infrastructure long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe.

Communication and Dissemination for European Projects (#2)

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post we introduced the importance of communication in the context of European-funded projects, and we defined three modules for establishing efficient communication:

A) Internal Communication Tools

B) Communication Activities

C) Website

After describing the tools for internal communication, we now address communication activities and the website.

Why do we need Communication activities?

They are the core of internal communication among project members and external communication with stakeholders. They define how the various actors in a project, including project members, scientists, external stakeholders, funding agencies, and citizens, communicate. They are usually described in the Communication Plan.

Communication and Dissemination for European Projects (#1)

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Communication is often considered a structural pillar in several domains. The commercial domain, of course, makes extensive use of every kind of communication tool, from social networks to storytelling techniques and traditional advertising, to engage users and ultimately increase profit. However, the importance of communication has also been recognized in science, and in particular in science projects funded by the European Community.

Documents like Communicating EU research and innovation: guidance for project participants demonstrate how serious this issue has been taken by the EU.

In addition, almost all EU projects I’ve come across, include a Communication Working Package.

This issue - or better this challenge - needs at least two ingredients to be properly tackled:

a good Communication Plan
the know how and technical tools which are, in the end, the substance of the communication itself. They include all the technical tools (e.g. teleconferencing tools) and best practices which must be used to carry on an effective communication based on the communication plan.

In this post I’ll deal with the second aspect, reporting the experience we had in the context of the EPOS european project and providing some thoughts, guidelines and - most importantly - our experience about the creation of all the tools we needed to set up an efficient communication.

We called it Communication & Management Toolkit.

HEADER IMAGE by Sceptre (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons