AquaINFRA
Infrastructure for Marine and Inland Water Research
The overall objective of the AquaINFRA project is to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) multi-disciplinary data. The goal is to develop services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.
The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects. It can be done from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders leveraging on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the other existing operational data spaces. Besides supporting the ongoing development of the EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA is addressing the specific need for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across those two domains.
A specific goal of AquaINFRA will be to develop an EOSC based research infrastructure combining the marine and freshwater domains. Those will include the development of a cross domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. A set of strategic use cases including a Pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea will provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities.
The AquaINFRA consortium consists of multi-disciplinary experts from 21 different partners. The consortium includes universities, SMEs and an international organisation. In addition there are included some internationally leading research institutes with proven track records in topics related to data infrastructures, biodiversity, freshwater ecology, hydrology, marine ecosystems, and maritime spatial planning as well as developing decision-support systems.
CSC is contributing to the technical coordination and alignment of the overall AquaINFRA technical architecture, and the integration and interoperability with related projects and initiatives. CSC will be leading the task which will document the access points of the AquaINFRA components to EOSC to facilitate the usage of and integration with the EOSC-Core services (Resource Catalogue, Marketplace, AAI Federation, Order Management, Helpdesk, Monitoring, Accounting) and the EOSC Exchange. Additionally, CSC will be contributing to the collection of user requirements and co-design of the system architecture.
The interoperability of the AquaINFRA services will be facilitated in harmonisation with the EOSC interoperability framework and a detailed implementation plan for the AquaINFRA Data Space and Data Discovery and Access Service (DDAS) will be prepared. CSC joins the tasks with other Finnish participants in the project, the National Land Survey of Finland (MML) and the Finnish Environmental Institute (SYKE).
