Objectives and vision of D4Science and D4Science-II projects
D4Science-II
The main objective of D4Science-II is to advance the current D4Science e-Infrastructure into a pivotal element that, through its capabilities and mediating role, will be capable of drawing numerous infrastructural initiatives and scientific communities within the scope of a Knowledge Ecosystem. Indeed a more powerful model in which e-Infrastructures are not isolated but dynamically interoperate and influence each other as the components of an ecosystem will be introduced. To create such a D4Science-II Knowledge Ecosystem, the project will focus on the deployment and exploitation of mechanisms and policies for the interoperability of application-level infrastructures and infrastructural services.
D4Science-II will develop technology and methodologies that will enable sustainable interoperation of multiple, diverse and heterogeneous data e-Infrastructures that have been established and are currently running autonomously, thereby creating e-Infrastructure ecosystems that can serve an expanded set of communities dealing with complex, multidisciplinary challenges whose solution is beyond reach with existing resources. Furthermore, D4Science-II will use the existing D4Science e-Infrastructure as a hub to bring and hold together several established scientific e-Infrastructures and, thus, set up a prototypical instance of such an e-Infrastructure ecosystem.
Infrastructures exchanging resources (using the D4Science e-Infrastructure as the mediator) will complement their individual strengths at a contained cost. Interoperability will foster the coordination of otherwise autonomous application-level infrastructures and infrastructural services into a true Knowledge Ecosystem.
The D4Science e-Infrastructure will act as the driving force behind the formation of the envisioned ecosystem. Given its layered approach to infrastructure building, it can conveniently mediate access to the computational facilities of the underlying EGEE infrastructure and, in turn, the connectivity fabric of the GÉANT infrastructure. Likewise, it can export unique functionality for the definition, operation, and autonomic management of Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Such capabilities appeal to many application-level infrastructures, repositories, and other infrastructural services that (i) have been extremely successful at aggregating resources of interest to their communities, but (ii) for strategic as well as practical reasons, have excluded the provision of advanced computational and collaborative services from the scope of their current design, and in some cases, from their future roadmap.
