D4Science Joint research activities

The objective of the D4Science Joint Research Activities (JRA) is to address the technical requirements raised by the Environmental Monitoring and Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management communities against the gCube framework.

Solutions are based on the instantiation, customisation, and consolidation of existing gCube functionality, but also on the addition of novel functionality required by these communities which will then also become available for exploitation across other scientific communities. The activities are organised into a number of interacting work packages:

• JRA1 - Overall Planning and Development Coordination – includes: (i) the analysis and correlation of the requirements produced by the target communities (NA5) and the corresponding Service Activities (SA1, SA2), (ii) the high level design of the functional instantiations and extensions of the gCube framework which are needed to satisfy community requirements, and (iii) the assignment of development tasks across the JRA2, JRA3 and JRA4 work packages in line with the nature of the functional extensions/instantiations;
• JRA2 – Environmental Monitoring community-specific software development –  includes implementation activities which relate specifically to the Environmental Monitoring community, according to the requirement analysis, high-level design and development planning defined in JRA1, such as the adaptation of existing services and applications to access and process Earth Observation data for inclusion in the D4Science infrastructure;
• JRA3 – Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management community-specific software development –  includes implementation activities which relate specifically to the requirements of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management community, such as the re-engineering of community-specific data and services for exploitation of the D4Science infrastructure;
• JRA4 – gCube Development – includes implementation activities to: (i) consolidate the gCube framework for use on a production-level infrastructure, and (ii) extend it with functionality derived from the requirements of the target communities but remaining sufficiently general to serve also other scientific communities.

The interactions among JRA work packages and the relationships of JRA with the other project activities are depicted in the D4Science activity organisation figure.