EGI-Engage

Engaging the Research Community towards an Open Science Commons

Then please include a short description of the project here.

Project Goals

Over the last decade, the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has built a distributed computing and data infrastructure to support over 21,000 researchers from many disciplines with unprecedented data analysis capabilities.

EGI builds on the European and national investments and relies on the expertise of EGI.eu - a non-profit foundation that provides coordination to the EGI Community, including user groups, EGI.eu participants in the EGI Council, and the other collaborating partners EGI-Engage aims to accelerate the implementation of the Open Science Commons by expanding the capabilities of a European backbone of federated services for compute, storage, data, communication, knowledge and expertise, complementing community-specific capabilities. The mission of EGI-Engage is to accelerate the implementation of the Open Science Commons vision, where researchers from all disciplines have easy and open access to the innovative digital services, data, knowledge and expertise they need for their work.

The Open Science Commons is grounded on three pillars:

• the e-Infrastructure Commons, an ecosystem of key services
• the Open Data Commons, where any researcher can access, use and reuse data
• and the Knowledge Commons, in which communities have shared ownership of knowledge and participate in the co-development of software and are technically supported to exploit state-of-the-art digital services.

Particular, EGI-Engage aims to accelerate the implentation of the Open Science Commons vision. Five ogjectives were set:

1. Ensure the continued coordination of the EGI Community in strategy and policy development, engagement, technical user support and operations of the federated infrastructure in Europe and worldwide.
2. Evolve the EGI Solutions, related business models and access policies for different target groups aiming at an increased sustainability of these outside of project funding. The solutions will be offered to large and medium size RIs, small research communities, the long-tail of science, education, industry and SMEs.
3. Offer and expand an e-Infrastructure Commons solution
4. Prototype an open data platform and contribute to the implementation of the European Big Data Value.
5. Promote the adoption of the current EGI services and extend them with new capabilities through user co-development

EGI-Engage will expand the capabilities offered to scientists (e.g. improved cloud or data services) and the spectrum of its user base by engaging with large Research Infrastructures (RIs), the long-tail of science and industry/SMEs. The main engagement instrument will be a network of eight Competence Centers, where National Grid Initiatives (NGIs), user communities, technology and service providers will join forces to collect requirements, integrate community-specific applications into state-of-the-art services, foster interoperability across e-Infrastructures, and evolve services through a user-centric development model. The project will also coordinate the NGI efforts to support the long-tail of science by developing ad hoc access policies and by providing services and resources that will lower barriers and learning curves.

GWDG’s Role in the project

GWDG is involved in the DARIAH Competence Center (DARIAH-CC) within EGI-Engage and will bring in its experience from the DARIAH-DE project as well as from DARIAH-EU, where GWDG is responsible for the e-Infrastructure Competence Centre. With the help of the DARIAH-CC, EGI-Engage will be able to engage with researchers from the Arts & Humanities. In particular, GWDG develops storage and OCR processing services.

Project Partners

EGI Engage is an international project involving 43 partners from over 30 countries and more than 70 institutions from Europe, the United States and six countries from the South East Asian region. The project is coordinated by European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), headquartered in Amsterdam.