IN24A-04:
The EPOS e-Infrastructure: Integrating Solid Earth Science in Europe
Tuesday, 16 December 2014: 4:39 PM
Luca Trani, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, Netherlands, Daniele Bailo, National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Rome, Italy and Keith G Jeffery, Keith Jeffery Consultant, Shrivenham, United Kingdom
Abstract:
The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is an ambitious long term integration plan addressing the major solid-earth research infrastructures in Europe. For its large scale and extent it is a unique initiative which will foster new scientific discoveries and enable scientists to investigate the solid earth system in unprecedented ways. A key aspect of EPOS is to provide end-users with homogeneous access to services and multidisciplinary data collected by monitoring infrastructures and experimental facilities as well as access to processing and visualization tools. Such a complex system requires a solid, scalable and reliable architecture in order to accommodate innovative features and to meet the evolving expectations of the heterogeneous communities involved. Within the FP7 EU project EPOS PP1 (Preparatory Phase), which is approaching its completion in October 2014, the goal of the infrastructure and virtual community working group (WG7) was to design and test a preliminary architecture. The EPOS e-infrastructure architecture has been systematically developed based on collected primary (user) and secondary (interoperation with other systems) requirements and through three distinct design refinement phases (Strawman, Woodman and Ironman). The EPOS architecture is constituted of Integrated Core Services (ICS), which provide access to thematic (domain-specific) services (Thematic Core Services - TCS) integrating national research infrastructures. The key component of the architecture is the metadata catalogue, which utilizes the CERIF2(Common European Research Information Format) standard. The metadata catalogue is conceived to effectively capture all the information needed and to make large (re-)use of existing domain specific standards. In this contribution we will present the lessons learned and the technical achievements of the EPOS Preparatory Phase.
