About D4Science and D4Science-II

D4Science and D4Science-II are European e-Infrastructure projects, co-funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.

D4Science

DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology 4 Science

D4Science aims to continue the path that the GÉANT (a multi-gigabit pan-European data communications network), EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe), and DILIGENT (A Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology) projects have initiated towards establishing networking, grid-based, and data-centric e-Infrastructures. These e-Infrastructures are expected to accelerate multidisciplinary research by overcoming several crucial barriers that stand in the way, primilary those related to heterogeneity, sustainability and scalability.

DILIGENT produced a testbed of an e-Infrastructure and its core, gCube. gCube is a generic software that allows the access to heterogeneous, distributed technologies, services and content and guarantees interoperability of these resources. In D4Science the gCube framework was developed. The gCube software and framework enable the building of Virtual Research Environments (VREs). These are based on shared computational, data and service resources offered by many providers like EGEE and large international organizations. VREs can be used for different requests, e.g. the monitoring of processes, the analysis of data and the collaboration of users.

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From a testbed to a production system

D4Science-II

Data infrastructure ecosystem for science

D4Science-II, the follow-up phase of D4Science, will develop the technology to enable interoperation of data e-Infrastructures that are running autonomously, thereby creating e-Infrastructure Ecosystems that will serve a significantly expanded set of communities dealing with multidisciplinary, scientific and societal challenges. To set up a prototypical instance of such an ecosystem, D4Science-II will bring together several scientific e-Infrastructures established in areas such as biodiversity, fishery resources management and high energy physics.  This will support several critical scientific scenarios that are distinct but also feed into and enrich each other. In collaboration with appropriate international bodies and initiatives, D4Science-II will take steps to ensure sustainability of the Knowledge Ecosystem.

Technologically, D4Science-II constitutes a continuation of the DILIGENT and D4Science projects, which have initiated an effort towards using existing network, grid, and repository infrastructures to deploy on top of them a pan-European research e-Infrastructure that will enable unlimited generation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. As the next step towards this goal, D4Science-II will transform the current, operational D4Science e-Infrastructure into the linchpin of an e-Infrastructure Ecosystem, holding together and mediating between all participating e-Infrastructures through programmatically-available interoperability services.

The D4Science-II Ecosystem will include among others, the GENESI-DR and DRIVER repository e-Infrastructures, and important thematic repositories maintained by international organizations, e.g., INSPIRE and AquaMaps. The project will create Virtual Research Environments offering significantly enhanced services to scientist without incurring high development and maintenance costs.

D4Science as a linchpin of a knowledge ecosystem

This figure shows the Knowledge Ecosystem envisioned, i.e., interoperable data e-Infrastructures, repositories, and scientific communities exploiting the services provided. It also illustrates the dual role played by D4Science e-Infrastructure, i.e., virtual aggregator of resources available in interoperable e-Infrastructures, and provider of these resources back to the participating e- Infrastructures and, through those, to complex VREs serving cross-domain scientific communities.