Donatella Castelli's presentation at the eROSA Workshop “Towards Open Science in Agriculture & Food”, a side event to High Level conference on FOOD 2030, Plovdiv, Bulgaria (13/6/2018)

1. www.bluebridge-vres.eu
D4Science experience: VREs for increasing
the sharing and collaboration in the
scientific communities
Donatella Castelli, CNR-ISTI
CNR-ISTI
donatella.castelli@isti.cnr.it
Towards Open Science in
Agriculture & Food,
13 June 2018, Plovdiv

2. D4Science
e-Infrastructure
Elecronic platform operated by a responsible entity offering an open
set of basic enabling services (including access to resources) to a
distributed Community of Practice
Data infrastructure
“e-Infrastructure” offering services for colletion, deposition, storage,
preservation, access, retrieval, analysis/mining/processing, publication,
etc.
D4Science
Towards Open Science in Agriculture and Food, 13 June 2018, Plovdiv
Serving Interdisciplinary &
multifacets collaboration at the
local, national, regional and
international levels
Serving knowledge generation processes
- Access to heterogeneous, distribuited,
across-domain data
- Rich data mining, analysis and processing
capabilities
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3. Multiple served domains
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Marine
scienceSocial Mining
Agri-food
Humanities
PARTHENOS
Environment
5100+ users
in 44 countries

4. Multiple target stakeholders
SMEs
Educators&
students
Researchers
Scientific
authorities
Citizens
Towards Open Science in Agriculture and Food, 13 June 2018, Plovdiv
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5. Leveraging others’ resources
Enabling services,
data mgmt services &
own resources
Existing
providers
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WP
S
As-a-service provision
“in the style of cloud”
Third-party
portals &
applications

6. Virtual Research
Environments
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VRE VRE VRE
Distributed and dynamically created Web
accessible environments tailored to specific
operational needs
• Tailored datasets, services, compute
and storage resources
• Collaboration support
• Tailored regulating policies
• Defined lifetime
• Little cost of creation and operation
VRE as-a-service

7. “Understanding how ecosystems of EU e-infrastructures can boost Blue Growth,” Brussels, 11 January
2017
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• Support collaborative data analysis and experimentation via a
secure and controlled data and workflow sharing
• Manage heterogeneous data access policies
• Implement Traceability and Reproducibility-Repeatability-
Reusability
Information objects can be
• files, dataset, workflows, experiments, etc.
• organized into folders
Users can
• share with selected users
• disseminate via persistent public URLs
Virtual workspace

8. Social networking is key to share information in e-Infrastructure
D4Science offers a continuously updated list of events / news
produced by users and applications
User-shared
News
Application-
shared News
Share News
Social Networking

9. • Experiments on Big Data
• Sharing inputs and results
• Save the provenance of experiments
• Supports R-R-R of experiments
WPS
REST
• Input/Out
• Parameters
• Provenance

10. Research workflow
Towards Open Science in Agriculture and Food, 13 June 2018, Plovdiv
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11. Blue Sectors related VREs
Towards Open Science in Agriculture and Food, 13 June 2018, Plovdiv
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WECAFC VRE: Support regional fishery management in collaboration with NOAA
(through FIRMS)
SDG-Indicators14.4.1 VRE: Built to support a FAO course on implementation and
reporting of SDG Indicator 14.4.1
GRSF VRE: Rich global source of stocks and fisheries information providing access
through UUIDs
Protected Area Impact Maps VRE: visualize, analyze and report on a range of
ecologically important seafloor features within MPA. To help countries to report
on their CBD (Aichi Target 11) goals
Aquaculture Atlas Generation VRE: generation and review of aquaculture maps
for offshore fish farms and coastal ponds.

12. Agro-climatic and Economic
Modelling Community
Goal: prediction of short and
long term agricultural yields,
considering operational
decisions and climate change
AgroClimated Modelling VRE
Data Access: AgrodDataCube (Fields,
Crops, Soil, Weather)
Data analytics: to share processes of
interest, e.g. crop simulation models
(WOFOST), crop phenology algos
- Repeatability, Parallel execution
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13. Food Safety Risk Assessment
Goal: to support emergency
risk identification and
assessment
RAKIP & DEMETER VREs
Data analytics to share models of
interest, namely computational-intensive
mathematical simulation routines to
support risk assessments (e.g. predictive
microbial modelling, quantitative
microbial risk assessment)
- Shared workspace and catalogue
- Repeatability support, parallel
execution
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14. Food Security
Goal: maximize crop
performance by selecting more
adapted plant varieties to
climate change
Food Security VRE
Data Access: INRA phenotyping data
Data analytics: to share processes,
e.g. plant height fitting (R), maïze ear
detection (python), … (Jupyter)
Social networking
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15. VREs (today)
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• 129 VREs
• 55,000+ data analysis/month
• 99.8 % availability

16. References / Links
• D4Science Web Site: http://www.d4science.org
• D4Science for developers: http://dev.d4science.org
• Catalogue of Applications
• https://www.gcube-system.org/catalogue-of-applications
• Software Key Features
• https://wiki.gcube-system.org/GCube_Features
• Developer Guide
• https://wiki.gcube-system.org/Developer%27s_Guide
• FeatherWeightStack
• https://wiki.gcube-system.org/Featherweight_Stack
• SmartGears
• https://wiki.gcube-system.org/SmartGears
• gCube APIs
• https://wiki.gcube-system.org/GCube_Application_Programming_Interface
• Administration Guide
• https://wiki.gcube-system.org/Administrator%27s_Guide
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