Data e-Infrastructure Initiative for Fisheries Management and Conservation of Marine Living Resources iMarine
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- Consortium Synthesis
- Subcontracting
- Other countries
- Additional partners
1.9Consortium as a wholeRationale of the consortiumThe iMarine consortium composition is a result of a multidimensional synthesis of the priorities established by the objectives of the project. As such, it not only brings together global centres of excellences, but also supplies all the ingredients for a timely delivery of high quality results. The objectives of the consortium are to (i) benefit from a open access to scientific information and data to provide timely information to support the Ecosystem Approach for the Management of Marine Living Resources; (ii) to benefit from the lower costs of infrastructures, applications and other services; (iii) to improve their data management, by shortening production cycles, enhanced computing capacity, increase the precision of their outputs by taking advantage of the coming tsunami of high resolution data, and (iv) reorganizing their development effort from isolated groups to shared and open development communities, to (v) establish a thriving community to support the shared development of resources on a sustainable data infrastructure. The consortium was carefully composed based on the following : Scientific Expertise: The project’s workplan cuts across several disciplines that include
iMarine not only .addresses the focus domains but also promises a versatility of services, that will allow discovery and exploitation of hidden opportunities for re-use of components and cross fertilisation of results. The consortium consists of a balanced number of scientists in a number of areas. Significant expertise is gathered in the two scientific clusters, one for the “fisheries management and conservation of marine living resources” related sciences and the other for “Information technology”. CNR, NKUA, E-IIS, US, Terradue, CERN and FORTH fall in the IT cluster of experts while FAO, FIN, UNESCO, CRIA, IRD provide fisheries and biodiversity expertise. In addition, FAO, CRIA and IRD have also IT expertise in serving EA-CoP community specific services. Technological Expertise: The technologies required in order to deliver the iMarine infrastructure to its users span a vast functional area, while they demand an advanced level of implementation skills, in terms of quality, complexity and power. In order to cover effectively and timely the foreseen technological and operational needs of the project, under its tight resource allocation plan, the pre-existence of technological expertise is mandatory. iMarine consortium includes partners that have a proven track of expertise on all the technologies that have to be implemented, reused or integrated. CNR, NKUA, E-IIS, US, Terradue, CERN, FORTH and FAO already offer infrastructure solutions that are fully interoperable and exploit underlying e-Infrastructures for data-intensive science. Operational Expertise: Delivering the planned iMarine data infrastructure is not confined to a single implementation but also mandates the establishment of a set of rules, procedures and instruments for infrastructure maintenance and support that bridge across domains can be used for the further development of research infrastructures. . iMarine consortium includes partners that contribute advanced skills covering the full lifecycle of software development, release and infrastructure operations. The proven performance of CERN and E-IIS in this domain is the guarantee of success in this area. Resource Adequacy: Resources committed to the project have to be adequate to cover the needs of the project, a requirement that is not restricted to human resources, but also to infrastructure resources, and the operational mechanisms that support and maintain them. Groups participating in the iMarine consortium come from organisations that have an impressive track in completing EU funded projects and can comply with all the resource demands of this proposal. In addition, it has been proven that consortium partners (e.g. CNR and NKUA) can extend their resource allocation beyond the contractually planned one. Other partners are developing or operating generic tools and services that can be aligned with components and services of the proposal, increasing the scale of federation, and exploiting the underlying infrastructures to reduce their claim on resources. Even before project start, several community partners have already committed effort to develop services that can exploit and/or contribute to the Open E-Science data infrastructure. Outreach and Impact Capacity: An important objective of the proposal is the support for a real, yet flexible and ever-changing Community of Practice. This automatically gives a significant role to the Outreach activities that reaches into the Community to help them articulate their policy and governance needs.. Having on-board the consortium appropriate structures for both raising awareness and exploiting the results, is considered to be a primary factor of success. The commitment of very representative community members to be part of the iMarine Board, even at this early stage, is very encouraging. Outreach and Impact Capacity is strengthened by the contributions of the community partners (FAO, FIN, UNESCO, CRIA, IRD) whose activities are organized and focussed by dedicated outreach experts (Trust-IT). The added advantage of a dedicated outreach group to the project is that they help articulate the vision towards open and participatory science by providing access channels between the project and the target user base, beyond the scope of the iMarine Board active partnerships. Management Capacity and Collaboration Strength: The project’s management structures, populated by experts of the partner organisations, combine long experience in all facets of Open e-Science project management. Together, they not only can maintain the workplan of such a large scale endeavour, but also bring a true vision of participatory data-intensive science. The management team has already established excellent collaboration relationships among the involved entities. The project builds on a tested scheme of partners’ roles and rules of management. ERCIM is the Administrative and Financial Coordinator and CNR-ISTI is the Scientific and Technical Coordinator, and has successfully completed a series of projects. The consortium partners have already established excellent collaboration links. The partners have already proven to be able to remove barriers concerning the open data flow in science and technology and minimise the communication and management overheads. The iMarine consortium has emerged through a process of evolution of collaborations and links established at European and even global level. A subset of the consortium members has a long history of successful European funded projects (including but not restricted to DILIGENT, D4Science I & II) with significant impact in the area of activity. This group of partners expertise in open and participatory data-intensive science, and can progress on a) sharing expertise and ownership of technologies that form the basis of project’s JRA activities b) the strict, yet powerful, set of SA, production-level principles of operation and c) a profound level of acquaintance with the application domain and user communities mobilized in the iMarine Project. This group guarantees the operation of successful practices and technologies, and offers the consortium new directions in their participatory and data-intensive science plans. The following list sums up the principles of the consortium,:
As a conclusion, together with the establishment of new governance and advisory structures, the iMarine consortium effectively forms an entirely new, innovative initiative. Consortium SynthesisThe iMarine consortium consists of fourteen (14) partners. The members span 7 countries and 3 continents, yet the initiative has a much bigger geographical footprint, as among its members 4 international organisations can be found. This geographical dispersion is required by the activities proposed. Furthermore 3 Industrial partners (including 2 SMEs) can be found in the consortium synthesis. Adopting a rather liberal categorization of their involvement, these partners fall in the following categories (partners are referenced by abbreviations):
The aforementioned categorisations roughly depict the need and involvement of each class of participant. In more details this is analyzed below. CNR-ISTI is the scientific and technical coordinating organisation of the iMarine project. Both the Project Director and the Technical Coordinator are highly experienced members of the organisation that have a successful history of leading similar open and participatory data-intensive science projects. Beside these two key positions, CNR-ISTI holds a major role in the implementation of project’s workplan and the gCube technology, being leader of four work packages and 10 tasks. Expertise applied in the iMarine includes scientific data handling and curation, interoperation of data infrastructures, federation, open access, and data management and visualisation, web GUI, grid enabled GIS and much more. In NA, as coordinating partner, CNR-ISTI, has the lead role of NA2. Its long relationship with representative members of the Community of Practice (FAO, FIN) puts it in the perfect position to take the lead. Together with FAO, that has a pivotal position in the international communities related to marine data management, statistics and analysis, provides the project with an unique chance to interface with a truly global community-implementation mediator in NA3. Finally, in NA4 as a data-intensive institute, CNR’s participation naturally aims into scientific dissemination. In SA, CNR not only brings a substantial fraction of the infrastructure at the disposal of the activity (depicted in SA1), but also, along with the interoperability expertise of NKUA, integrates a significant number of common interfaces and tools into the Virtual laboratories, offering the basis of their operation. SA2 leadership is in good hands with CNR-ISTI as a result of the experience gathered in D4Science I and II VRE Operation tasks. CNR complements the teams of E-IIS and NKUA in the tasks of SA3. Finally, in JRA, CNR has leadership of JRA1 in order to continue the development of the infrastructure. The expertise in scientific data discovery, mining, and analysis is strengthened in D4Science I & II, and is materialized in the leadership of the respective tasks (TJRA2.3, TJRA3.2) and work package JRA2, which is propagated also into participation in API definition and implementation tasks of JRA4.
The workplan analysis shows that CNR-ISTI and NKUA cover many components in the gCube system, at a surprisingly low cost. This is feasible as both partners have proven the capacity to support the undertaken activities via co-funding or other external support, allowing to reduce the effort of this tasks low. This frees resources in the project to support the Community of Practice. CERN has two different roles in iMarine, offering to the consortium two facets of its domain of expertise. On one hand CERN will lead the activity of deployment and operation of the infrastructure (SA1); it will deploy monitoring and accounting tools applying its expertise in managing large scale distributed infrastructures for Science, as seen in several grid ones (DataGrid, EGEE etc). On the other hand CERN will contribute to new developments in gCube that strengthen its data transfer facilities, by bringing into TJRA2.2 and TJRA4.2 expertise and technology developed over a long history of grid middleware and protocol design and implementation. CERN will also participate in training activities (TNA4.3) aiming to cover the thematic area of infrastructure operation. E-IIS is a major Italian ITC industry and is the primary, long standing, commercially oriented contributor to gCube and has helped steer the project towards the definition of a solid development environment. E-IIS is ISO9001 certified and has level 3 on CMMi for all its production departments. In iMarine E-IIS strengthens consortium expertise in three main areas. In the security domain, E-IIS has a history of applying security solutions in a gCube infrastructure, and leads the corresponding task of TJRA1.2. In the infrastructure operation area (SA1), enterprise level cloud infrastructure resources are added and operated in iMarine, adding not just a set of resources but rather a new perspective in infrastructure sustainability and operation. Finally E-IIS is the leading partner that handles the demanding task of building and releasing the gCube system, an activity that has been carried by the company with great proven professionalism, given the expertise of its members on the ETICS system that gCube releases are driven from. Finally E-IIS participates in NA tasks both in the standardisation (TNA3.3), as security is an enabling factor in this area, and the training (TNA4.3) on both cloud and security mechanisms exploitation. ENG has established cooperation with EGEE (as in the Middleware Security Working Groups) and actively participates in OGF and other initiatives on Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA). US also has a long track of contribution to gCube technology, and in the context of iMarine, will offer its expertise in and contribute mainly to JRA activities. More specifically US is involved in the maintenance of lower layers of the gCube infrastructure and the provision of specific workflow execution facilities, closely collaborating with CNR and NKUA. Expertise in conceptualisation and modelling will be of relevance to the resource model definition, and the new enhanced storage facilities to be implemented in JRA2, where US, along with CNR will be bringing the experience of the OCMA architecture as a heritage of previous gCube versions. US will be also involved in the corresponding API definition (JRA4) and will support training activities on topics of relevance, mainly aiming to developer training, in TNA4.3. FORTH is a new entry in the gCube technology environment and comes into the project to offer focused expertise and implementation solutions, strengthening the technology in the domain of semantic information management and exploitation, where the expertise of the FORTH ICL laboratory is concentrated. In iMarine the institute will bring expertise in the following two areas: a) management of taxonomic/ontological data/metadata, and b) modelling, representation and exchange of provenance information of digital objects based on the processes that affect them. Consequently, in JRA workplan both tasks (TJRA2.3 & TJRA3.4) that heavily related to the topic are to a large degree handled by FORTH, as well as the respective originating activity in NA3 (TNA3.4). . Finally FORTH supports the exploitation of semantic information and technologies in the Data Discovery process (JRA3.1) and participates the in tasks defining the related APIs (JRA4). Terradue brings in iMarine taskforce expertise in several domains. Terradue is a participant of GENESI-DEC, allowing gCube technology to interact with and consume various sources of environmental monitoring and earth observation data. Expertise with these sources is exploitable in the AquaMaps case, both in data mining algorithms and in access/interoperability (TJRA3.2, TJRA2.2). Terradue also has long experience with geospatial data processing and will assist to enhance the integration of gCube search with OGC services (TJRA3.1). The impact and footprint of these facilities in the API will be managed by the company’s participation in JRA4. Finally Terradue will be involved in driving specification of its implementation in JRA through its participation in NA3. Trust-IT brings to the Consortium promotional dissemination and eTraining expertise through its leadership of NA4, working in synergy with partners to achieve the goals set. Through these capacities Trust-IT will also provide its project exploitation through established collaborations and an extensive contact database by focusing on: direct liaison with the European organisations/partners for increased visibility and knowledge-exchange; Communication of iMarine activities among the online user communities and the Community of Practice board. FAO has two roles in the project: on one hand it acts as a major point of reference for the Community of Practice, on the other hand it implements technical results, actually delivering part of the technology to the users. This dual role places FAO in the NA2 group of partners. Yet the major role of the organisation is the leadership of NA3. NA3 provides the input for the development of applications and interoperable software that will be brought into SA and JRA. This role is well fitted to the team’s expertise that covers, among others, development of partnerships and related Governance mechanisms, and information analysis. Additionally FAO has direct links to specifications’ working groups, which makes it a member of the related TNA4.3 task. Within SA, FAO deploys community resources (software, data sources etc) and leads TSA2.2. Finally in JRA, FAO participates JRA3 on data mining and semantic data analysis, bringing its vast expertise in scientific data handling and analysis, as demonstrated by a long series of related activities it has performed.., while in JRA4 is involved to the degree needed for bringing NA3 artefacts to the context of the WP (APIs). FAO will be among the major community contributors in terms of data sets, reference data, semantic structures (ontologies) and services placed at the disposal of the iMarine Data e-Infrastructure. FIN has developed a several years of experience with the gCube technology. Through this interaction it has obtained a set of instruments that use on state-of-the-art technologies for data access, processing and collaboration. Within iMarine, FIN will provide this experience to others within NA3 activity and will integrate a number of community resources and tools into the Virtual Laboratory (TSA2.2). The experience of the partner in the leading gCube Aquamaps services implementation is expected to be a catalyst for the uptake of other communities. FIN will also provide to the consortium data sets, reference data and services enriching the resources placed at the disposal of the iMarine Data e-Infrastructure. CRIA (Reference Center on Environmental Information) is a Brazilian non-government organization whose aim is to contribute towards a more sustainable use of Brazil's biodiversity through the dissemination of high quality information and education. They have developed information systems for the management and dissemination of biodiversity data. More specifically, CRIA has expertise on software development for insuring data quality, suitability for use and data set of modelling algorithms. This suite of tools is offered by CRIA, through the development of interoperability mechanisms on the side of gCube, acquiring species, link data and services for the iMarine Virtual Research Environments. NA3 and SA2 involvement is planned for CRIA, so that resources are integrated into the iMarine Data e-Infrastructure. IRD brings into iMarine expertise on data management and exchange protocols, and semantic technologies for exploitation of capture information, all stemming from the community exploitation perspective. A regional perspective is given to the domain, allowing NA3 (where IRD is also participating in several subtasks) to identify new requirements, definitions, specifications and policies. Additionally IRD, brings into the iMarine Data e-Infrastructure resources in the context of SA2. UNESCO, through IODE/OBIS brings a long expertise in biodiversity data management and application design to he consortium. It’s international expertise on taxonomy, modelling and marine data management, harmonisation, interoperability is widely recognized. OBIS was one of the earliest Associate Members of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org) which publishes data on all species. OBIS is a very active participant in GBIF activities, and one of the largest publishers of data to GBIF, reflecting its role as a specialist network for marine species. UNESCO’s OBIS strengthens significantly the community of practice of the project and its involvement in the workplan is focused in NA3 and SA2 areas. Last, but not least, ERCIM will manage the finance and administration of the project, providing the Financial and Administrative Director. The organisation has coordinated several project consortia in FP6 and FP7, managing several 10s of M€ in European Community contribution to date, establishing the expertise and trust required to address the inherent complexity of an I3 project. This expertise is proven to most consortium members, as ERCIM has a long withstanding collaboration with the majority of them. Additionally ERCIM has brought the financial and administrative management of the DILIGENT and D4Science I & II projects, into complete success, with high efficiency acting always timely and accurately. Within iMarine, ERCIM offers consortium partners all the required logistical support in ascertaining needs, ensures the fulfilment of financial requirements as defined by the European Commission, and addresses specific organisational and unlikely collaboration challenges that might affect the execution of the work plan as a whole. Given the increasing complexity of the consortium, the role of ERCIM will be focused on the overall project administration, including the management of the European Union financial contribution. ERCIM will also be responsible for managing the budget allocated to the iMarine Board, including the reimbursement of travel costs associated with participation in iMarine Board and Advisory Council meetings, as many of these members and all four of the advisors are external to the consortium. SubcontractingVlaams Instituut Voord de Zee (VLIZ or Flanders Marine Institute) will be one of three sub-contracted partners in the iMarine project. The Flanders Marine Institute has developed the underlying technology for a Pan-European Species-directories Infrastructure (PESI; http://www.eu-nomen.eu/pesi/). The PESI initiative is the next step in integrating and securing taxonomically authoritative species name registers that underpin the management of biodiversity in Europe. The infrastructure integrates the three main all-taxon registers in Europe, namely the European Register of Marine Species, Fauna Europaea, and Euro+Med PlantBase in coordination with EU based nomenclators and the network of EU based Global Species Databases. The Flanders Marine Institute will provide the iMarine initiative with support in two areas:
This agreement with iMarine has been made possible as Flanders Marine Institute’s objectives include an ambition to become and important biodiversity centre for Europe where data and information from a wide range of marine sciences are archived and made easily accessible. The support to be provided by VLIZ is the equivalent of approximately 5 person months over the project’s full duration. SPECIES 2000 (Sp2000) is a registered not-for-profit organisation in the United Kingdom and will be a sub-contracted partner in the iMarine project. Species 2000 is a federation of database organisations working closely with users, taxonomists and sponsoring agencies. The goal of the Species 2000 project is to create a validated checklist of all the world's species (plants, animals, fungi and microbes) by bringing together an array of global species databases covering each of the major groups of organisms. Sp2000 maintains the Catalogue of Life (http://www.catalogueoflife.org/) which is the result of many projects and initiatives, including the D4Life and i4Life infrastructure projects. Sp2000 will provide the iMarine initiative with support in two areas:
The support to be provided by VLIZ is the equivalent of approximately 5 person months over the project’s full duration. NEAFC (http://www.neafc.org/) is a convention based Regional Fisheries Management Organization. The updating of the Convention in 2006 and the London declaration to immediately apply the “new” Convention commits NEAFC to conservation and protection of biodiversity. NEAFC will be a sub-contracted partner of iMarine for participation in the iMarine Board as member an Advisor. NEAFC will provide the iMarine initiative with support in two areas:
NEAFC’s interest in iMarine is to find solutions for a more systematic scientific use of VMS data in order to get reliable information of fishing activity in time and space. ICES has asked NEAFC to include more information in the messages so the data are of greater scientific relevance. NEAFC knows that VMS data have their problems, but at present there has not been a dedicated attempt to use them and investigate the problems in them, and the iMarine project provides an opportunity to collaboratively look for solutions on various aspects of data sharing with high confidentiality requirements. The support to be provided by NEAFC is the equivalent of approximately 8 person months over the project’s full duration. Other countriesParticipation from other countries comes from Brazil (CRIA) and the Philippines (FIN) is foreseen in iMarine. These international participations come to strengthen the Community footprint of the project especially beyond the European borders, which is of primary concern to the project, as Aquatic Resource management is in its nature global. It is only through international uptake, that the results of the project can reach their objectives for allowing seamless flow of comprehensible information among regional information systems and disciplines. In the Community of Practice, several generic tools and services exist that remove important obstacles for the open access to scientific information and data. To reduce the cost of development, and profit from the synergies with the often large and cross-discipline e-Infrastructures, several partners were identified that bring many years of expertise in data-intensive discovery, mining and visualization to the project. The consortium aims to support a global Community of Practice and can count many international experts in the iMarine Board that provide a unique group of experts that already collaborate across disciplines. To further their vision of a Ecosystem Approach to Marine Living Resources Management, these experts already identified several international open access initiatives. In particular, they highlighted the biodiversity data management facilities offered by UNESCO/OBIS, that integrates scientific data from a wide variety of formats and institutions, and exposes these through the Darwin Protocol, FIN in the Philippines that holds a unique system for species probability calculation that already benefits from grid enabled GIS, and CRIA in Brazil, where a large pool of developers works to brings species modelling applications into JAVE, and further refine these to increase precision, also in view of the coming data tsunami Additional partnersIt is not intended to expand the size of the proposed consortium. However, membership of the iMarine Board may be expanded to include stakeholders willing to fund their technical or advisory support to the iMarine initiative. Yüklə 0,98 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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