Demonstrators

A number of Blue Cloud Demonstrators will be developed that will make use of existing, and drive the further development of additional, Blue Cloud services. The Blue-Cloud Demonstrators have been selected as applications that are specific for oceans and seas, could be expanded to fresh water bodies, and are necessary for marine ecosystems research, conservation, forecasting & innovation in the Blue Economy. In particular the demonstrators have been formulated taking into account the following requirements:

• Address one or several of the policy challenges defined in the Bioeconomy Strategy, the Circular Economy Strategy, the European Open Science Cloud Initiative, the Blue Growth Strategy, the Common Fisheries Policy, the Maritime Spatial Planning Directive, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the International Ocean Governance Communication and the UN SDGs;
• Integrate the Essential Ocean Variables, notably the biological variables, including plankton biomass and diversity;
• Build on the multi-disciplinary data, algorithms, and computing platforms that will be federated as part of the Blue Cloud system;
• Take account of the parallel EOSC thematic initiatives being developed – such as the Food Cloud initiative;
• Demonstrate how the Blue Cloud Services developed can contribute to unlocking the innovation potential of the Blue Cloud showcasing its potential in promoting the blue economy shortening the time span between research and innovation in frontier fields, such as micro-organisms and genomics-enabled innovations.

Each demonstrator will deliver a service accessible through a Virtual Lab powered by the Blue Cloud Platform. Each service (Virtual Lab) will provide access to datasets, products, and computations routine exploitable to analyse datasets and (re)generate products. This is at core of the open science that is a pillar of the Blue Cloud platform. Each product will be made accessible through a Virtual Lab (operational service accessible online) that will provide the documentation, examples of use, and the technology to exploit the service. The Blue Cloud VRE will have a common dashboard for accessing Virtual Labs for performing collaborative research.

The five Blue-Cloud Demonstrators will be developed in close cooperation between the technical team implementing the Blue Cloud technical infrastructure and with researchers in order to describe the required analytical workflows and to use these for designing the Virtual Labs. While developing, much interaction will take place between the researchers and the technical developers in order to test and fine tune prototypes.