The Main Findings of the WT Are

TCS revision

Goal: to revise the TCS implementation by assessing the maturity of each EPOS WG from a technical, financial and governance point of view.The revision was performed by a Working Team (WT) who focused on the questions presented in Table 1. In order to answer to questions, the WT have taken into consideration all the documents the WGs have sent to WP4 and WP6 in the last year: 1) May 2013 Preparatory document for the EPOS Thematic Core Services; 2) October 2013 Document for the EPOS Thematic Core Services; 3) February 2014 Financial Plan; 4) 24-28 February Prague presentations; 5) March 2014 EPOS TCS Implementation Plan, please note that questions presented in Table 1 mainly result from document #5 and discussions during the WG meeting in Prague. In the last pages of the present document a summary of these 5 documents is reported. Table 2 summarizes the main findings of the WT, which is a synopsis of the current state of each WG. This information will be presented to the IAPC during the meeting in Lisbon in late June and is being used to decide which communities are best positioned to be considered for various funding mechanisms. As the Chair and co-Chair of a EPOS WG you should please review the entire table, and check the appraisal assigned to your WG situation. The WT welcomes the opportunity to clarify its findings and we are willing to include additional and/or new information and/or corrections useful to modify/update the table.

The main findings of the WT are:

• The general architecture of the WGs is not consistent. ACTION: EPOS PDB have proposed an more clear definition of pillars/nodes that WGs should use to consider whether they need to re-organise (see page 2 and Fig. 1).
• The governance of the WGs is often insufficiently described. ACTION: EPOS needs that TCSs have a governance framework where data management and services will be implemented.
• Financial information is often incomplete or not provided. ACTION: WGs need to urgently provide more detailed financial information in order to be classified as existing or under implementation.

Working Team: Alice Clemenceau, John Clinton, Lilli Freda, Thomas Hoffmann, AnnakaisaKorja

Workflow: 1) collected all documents received by the WGs in the last year(DONE);

2) summarised the information suitable to answer questions on technical, data policy and access rules, finances, and governance aspects from the various documents received by the WGs (DONE – summary provided here);

3) contact each WG for implementation/correction/finalization of the information (NOW);

3) finalize the document to be presented to the Council (24-25 June 2014, Lisbon) and to the BGR (30 September 2014, Amsterdam).

EPOS TCS Architecture - Definitions for various components as described in the EPOS 3.7 and 7.5 deliverables

TCS – community level integration – it is a Governance tool

A governance framework where the data and services are provided through different pillars and where the community discusses implementation strategies, sustainability, legal, and ethic issues.

PILLAR: Organizational structure

It represents the environment where different sets of data, products and services, directly related to a specific community, can be coordinated managed and organized through distributed/single nodes.

NODE - it is a RI element

It represents a distributed network of infrastructures or a single RI delivering data, products and/or services directly related to the data integrated in each pillar belonging to each TCS for that specific community.

SERVICES – not a topological entity – they are IT tools for data management

IT solutions provided to the scientific community through the multiple or individual nodes belonging to a pillar.

Figure 1. Please note that this figure is used only for providing a visual representation of the above definitions

Table 1. General: Questions the WT focused on for the TCS assessment

Table 2. General: Summary of the WT TCS Evaluation

Specific to WG10: REMARKS AND QUESTION ABOUT FINANCE

Remarks:

-For each pillar, the major part of the costs are concentrated on 2014 and 2015.

-The National projects (2014-2015) are the only funding source mentioned, altogether, it funds 31% of the whole TCS (~56% of the costs in 2014 and 2015).

Questions:

Host premium:

-The plan is to locate WG10 TCS in the Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET AGH in Poland, does it provide some kind of “host premium”?

National funding:

-The Polish National project is granted 3.5M€, but if we sum up the total of the national support mentioned as secured for 2014-2015, it reaches 4.5M: where do the extra 1M€ come from?

-For Pillar 1, it is mentioned that most of the costs should be funded nationally (actually, 60% is “assumed to be secured”, does it refer to the Polish national project using structural funds?). How secured is this? Can you provide more details?

-Where do the 10% of national funding mentioned for pillars 2, 3 and 4 come from? Are they secured?

-What will happen after 2015 when the Polish national project will be finished?

EU funding:

-For pillars 2, 3 and 4, it is mentioned that EU funding is required. Do you have dedicated calls for proposals in mind and what are their deadline and funding opportunities? Which activities in which pillar would it concern? Please provide more information, in particular about "LCE-16 2014: Understanding, preventing and mitigating the potential environmental impacts and risks of shale gas exploration and exploitation"? What about the I3 project?

EPOS-ERIC flexible funding:

-For the pillars 2, 3 and especially 4 it is mentioned that EPOS flexible funding would be needed. Are the activities, period and amount identified?

In general, please provide further information regarding the funding of each pillar besides the Polish national project (structural funds), discriminating between the funding that is secured and the funding that is envisioned.

Specific to WG1: Evaluation Summary based on the received documents

WG 10 Infrastructures for georesources

Chair: Beata Orlecka-Sikora

Co-chair: Stanislaw

Simone

Grzegorz Kwiatek

Jean Robert

Anders

Technical

There exists one ‘Thematic Core Service’ (TCS) for WG10, Induced Seismicity Node that will integrate IS Research Infrastructures. This TCS is internally organized in four different ‘pillars’. Not operational yet. The prototype will become operational within 2014. It will have a full functionality of the final WG10 TCS and it will be developed to this final form during the construction phase of EPOS.

Pillar 1 Acquisition of Induced Seismicity Episodes

Pillar 2InSilico Experiments Including Technology-oriented Seismic Hazard

Pillar 3 Document Repository

Pillar 4 Outreach, Education, Users’ Feedback

Operability

Interoperability level

WG10 TCS computing resources to manage, store and analyze induced seismicity data will be provided by PL-Grid infrastructure of which Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET is a coordinator. Data Center will collect the mentioned seven IS episodes and upload them, on user’s request, to WG10 TCS.

Details concerning TCS/ICS compatibility:

• Metadata catalogue, WG10 provides detailed information concerning IS metadata for WG7. To assure EPOS-CERIF compatibility either WG10 CERIF setup will be provided or a 100% CERIF-compatible system. CERIF applicability for WG10 purposes is currently in test phase.
• WG10 TCS services, TCS architecture is based on InSilicoLab technology. This technology implements open, widely accepted standards, with known API. These key factors make it easy to integrate with ICS web services.
• Data compatibility, Data are stored in several data formats. WG10 works closely with WG7 on this topic in order to achieve data compatibility. As a result we expect EPOS to provide common tools allowing users transparent access to the community data.
• WGs Support, work duplication, In order to achieve compatibility layer between various WGs of EPOS WG10 is actively involved in works of the Recommendation Board. We expect that the Board will provide best practice examples, recommendations concerning standards used in EPOS (above-mentioned metadata structure, protocols for data transfer, data sharing strategies and many more).

Access to data products