D4Science blog

A new release of the gCube software is now available. It is the version 1.8.0 and it includes important novelties.

Among the innovations introduced by this release, graphically appealing can be emphasized with the GIS viewer, that allows to visualize species distribution maps.
The images show the distribution of dangerous species.  The first one with the earth globes represents the plain images as they were generated before release 1.8.0. The other two are screenshots of the new GIS viewer. 

Click here to find more detailed information.
 

The 25 May D4Science-II Members General Assembly took place in Rome, Italy, with the presence of: Andrea Manieri, E-IIS, Donatella Castelli, CNR, Pasquale Pagano, CNR, Fabio Simeoni (representing US on behalf of Richard Connor), Fabrice Brito (representing Terradue on behalf of Pedro Gonçalves), Jessica Michel, ERCIM, Marc Taconet, FAO, Tim Smith, CERN.

Following the agenda, the Members voted to add two representatives to the PMB to include presence of the communities, one loosely referred to as “Biodiversity Scenarios” and the other as “Digital Libraries”. This consultation was accepted as well as the actual representatives, that will be the following: Marc Taconet with Johannes Keizer or Anton Ellenbroek as Deputy for FAO, and Tim Smith or Salvatore Mele for CERN.

The minutes of the meeting can be found on the BSCW
 AGENDA

11:00 – 11:20 Intro (Donatella  Castelli)
11:20 – 11:50 Project status – next steps and other open issues with respect to the reporting to the Commission – QATF reporting (Jessica Michel, and Lino Pagano)
11:50 – 13:30 Discussion about PMB membership and gCore-II  experimentation (chaired by Jessica Michel)
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:30 Discussion about the Dissemination and Sustainability plan - design and implementation of it? (chaired by FAO)
15:30 – 17:00 Open Discussion on topics raised by the MGA participants & Agreement on future MGA meetings (chaired by Donatella Castelli)

The D4science II project was represented at the 5th EGEE User Forum meeting held from 12-16 april by the Uppsala University(Sweden).

1. Building Scientific Workflows for the Fisheries and Aquaculture Management Community based on Virtual Research Environments was presented by Pedro Andrade (CERN).
   The management of resources related to the Fisheries and Aquaculture (FARM) domain is complex and involves different scientific activities. The people involved in the domain are distributed worldwide: scientists in the field, regional statistics departments, national governing bodies, etc. Distributed information must be produced, analyzed, processed, shared, and preserved by all multiple actors through a number of scientific workflows. The D4Science-II project provides a number of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to address the collaboration needs of this community.
2. Pros and Cons of cloud adoption in the Scientific Data Infrastructures - the D4S-II case was presented by Andrea Manieri (Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.)
   The D4Science-II project provides as major product the gCube middleware. It is a grid-enabled service oriented middleware enabling the creation and operation of Virtual Research Environments, to serve the management and exploitation of scientific data. As part of the D4Science-II project a study on the impact of cloud technology (mainly Virtualisation) and cloud capabilities (on-demand availability and scalability) on the gCube software will be performed. The study will also analyse the impact of cloud technology from a commercial point of view (market positioning, possible exploitation strategies).