D4Science 6th Technical Committee Meeting at CNR-ISTI

The 6th Technical Committee (TCom) meeting took place between the 17-20 of March in Pisa, Italy. The meeting was hosted by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI).

A D4Science TCom event is a face-to-face meeting which aims to collectively address any technical issues that arise along the course of the project and to define a concrete plan to properly address them. It is open and flexible, i.e. besides technical partners the whole consortium is potentially invited to attend dependent on the topics to be discussed.

This TCom event primarily focused on (i) analysing the current status of activities, (ii) reaching a common understanding on the coming activities and (iii) reporting on the status and development of the released infrastructure and the supported Virtual Research Environments (VREs), i.e. Global Ocean Chlorophyll Monitoring, Global Land Vegetation Monitoring, Fisheries Country Profiles Production System and AquaMaps.

The meeting consisted of 30 slots some of them occurring in parallel, and discussing the following topics:

• gCube technology: critical bugs and open requests - status and next steps;
• gCore training: features in 0.4.4, features and plans for 0.5.0, best-effort strategies;
• gCube Application Support Layer technology: development activity;
• gCube technology support for infrastructure bootstrapping: enhanced facilities design;
• gCube technology for Time Series support: report on specific meeting and plans;
• gCube testing: rethinking the strategy;
• gCube monitoring tools: status and enhancements;
• gCube Software Release Cycle: new procedures;
• Production Infrastructure: status and plans;
• Virtual Research Environments: status and plans;
• User Community Requirements: feedback on current functionality.

Together with the TCom event, a Project Management Board (PMB), a Members General Assembly (MGA), an Intermediate Project Review Rehearsal and a Project Executive Board (PEB) took place. During these meetings the members of the governing boards analysed the current status of project activities and the short and long term plans. They decided on the concrete actions to put in place in the context of the project. The PMB and MGA meetings elaborated the strategy governing the next period of the project.

10 out of 11 participating organisations joined the event with a full total of 28 persons in attendance.