The short story of the projects I am involved in
D4Science

The D4Science project deployed an e-Infrastructure to address the needs of scientific communities affiliated with the broad disciplines of Environmental Monitoring (EM) and Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management (FARM). D4Science deployed applications that exploits resources provided by ESA, FAO and WorldFish but that can also integrate and process data from any other sources.

This e-Infrastructure provides facilities for creating Virtual Research Environments (VREs) based on shared computational, data and service resources offered by EGEE and D4Science infrastructures at a European level, as well as on data and domain-specific service resources offered by large international organizations. The D4Science infrastructure interoperates sites based on:

  • gLite services providing computing and storage grid resources;
  • gCube services providing on demand and dynamic Virtual Research Environments.

The D4Science production infrastructure counts today about 42 nodes spread over 4 countries and shares about 140 cores as well 25TB disk space. D4Science extended the EGEE production infrastructure with additional gLite sites allowing the sharing of computational and storage resources for D4Science communities at a large scale.

The EGEE production infrastructure counts today about 240 sitesspread over 45 countries and shares about 36,000 CPUs, as well 5PB disk space plus additional tape mass storage.

gCube enables scientists to declaratively and dynamically build transient Virtual Resaearch Environments --VREs-- by aggregating and deploying on-demand content resources, application services, and computing resources. It also monitors the shared resources during the VREs lifetime guaranteeing their optimal allocation and exploitation. Finally, it provides mechanisms to easily create VREs dedicated web portals through which scientists can access their content and services.

gCube
gCube
The gCube system is realised as a service oriented framework composed of a set of interacting services providing:
  • support for the creation and operation of on-demand, transient virtual research environment;
  • features necessary for handling shared content and application resources;
  • access to information sources and applications provided by third-parties;
  • a set of typical DL functions, like search, annotation, personalisation, document visualisation.

These services are designed to exploit the gLite middleware and are capable to consume the high computational and storage capabilities of the Grid infrastructure released by the EGEE project. Thus gCube services support complex and time consuming functionalities, while focusing on optimizing resource usage and satisfying QoS contracts.

Diligent

The DILIGENT project is creating an advanced test-bed that allows virtual e-Science communities to share knowledge and collaborate in a secure, coordinated, dynamic and cost-effective way. The DILIGENT test-bed is built by integrating Grid and Digital Library (DL) technologies. Merging of these different technologies lays the foundations for a next generation e-Science knowledge infrastructure with many different research and industrial applications.

The test-bed is supporting two complementary real-life application scenarios: one from the environmental e-science domain and one from the cultural heritage domain. The first user community is composed of representatives from leading organisations that operate in the environmental sector; the second consists of scholars, distributed all over the world working together in a three-year project to merge the medical, humanity, social science and communication research areas. The DILIGENT infrastructure, which is built upon the efforts of the EGEE project, is funded in part by the European Community's Information Society Technologies priority of the Sixth Framework Programme.

Driver

The "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research" (DRIVER) project responds to the vision that any form of scientific-content resource, including scientific/technical reports, research articles, experimental or observational data, rich media and other digital objects should be freely accessible through simple Internet-based infrastructures. The new DRIVER repository infrastructure enables researchers to plug into the new knowledge base and use scientific content in a standardised, open way. The project is funded by the European Commission under the auspices of the "Research Infrastructure" unit.

Open Access to research information is vital for researchers and helps the public appreciation and understanding of science. DRIVER will be helping countries to create networks of openly-accessible repositories for research information. The project is a joint collaboration between ten international partners with the intention to create a knowledge base of European research. DRIVER puts a test-bed in place across Europe to assist the development of a knowledge infrastructure for the European Research Area. DRIVER is preparing the future expansion and upgrade of the Digital Repository infrastructure across Europe and ensures the widest possible user involvement.

Delos is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries partially funded by the European Commission in the frame of the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). The main objectives of DELOS are research, whose results are in the public domain, and technology transfer, through cooperation agreements with interested parties.

Diligent
That all citizens, anywhere, anytime, should have access to Internet-connected digital devices to search all of human knowledge, regardless of barriers of time, place, culture or language has been a vision of DELOS since its inception. DELOS believes that, in the near future, networked virtual libraries will enable anyone from their home, school or office to access the knowledge contained in the digital collections created by traditional libraries, museums, archives, universities, governmental agencies, specialised organizations, and individuals around the world. These new libraries will offer digital versions of traditional library, museum and archive holdings including text, documents, video, sound and images. But they will also provide powerful new technological capabilities that enable users to refine their requests, analyse the results, access collections in other languages, share resources, and work collaboratively. 

DELOS is currently working on the development of a Digital Library Reference Model that is designed to meet the needs of the next-generation systems, and on a globally integrated prototype implementation of a Digital Library Management System, called DelosDLMS, which will serve as a concrete partial implementation of the reference model and will encompass many software components developed by DELOS partners. They are two major steps in the direction of the DELOS vision.