Abstract
Cloud and Earth Observation (EO) based services offer the European Research community a wealth of powerful tools. However, for many researchers these tools are currently out of reach. It is difficult to find and select suitable services. Establishing agreements with cloud and EO service providers and ensuring legal and technical compliance requires specialist skills and takes an inordinate amount of time. Equally, service providers find it difficult to reach and meet the needs of the research community in technical, financial and legal areas. The Open Clouds for Research Environments consortium (OCRE) will change this, by putting in place an easy adoption route. In the autumn of 2019, OCRE will run a pan-European tender and establish framework agreements with service providers who meet the requirements of the research community. 10.000 European research and education institutes will be able to directly consume these offerings via the European Open Science Cloud service catalogue, through ready-to-use agreements. They will not have to run a tender of their own. In addition, to stimulate usage, OCRE will make available 9.5 million euro in service credits (vouchers), through adoption funds from the European Commission. OCRE is a pioneer project without precedence, with potentially high impact in the future EO market activities and evolution of service offering, with the objective to burst the usage of EO commercial services by the research environment.
Highlights
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a European Commission (EC) initiative started in 2015 [1] that aims at the development an infrastructure providing its users with services using and promoting open science practices, such as the FAIR Data principles [2]
Open Clouds for Research Environments consortium (OCRE) is a pioneer project without precedence, with potentially high impact in the future Earth Observation (EO) market activities and evolution of service offering, with the objective to burst the usage of EO commercial services by the research environment
From the results shown in this subsection, the OCRE team can summarize that the Copernicus Sentinel satellites open an era of massive satellite data with almost global daily observations, but for many researchers, other third party data is still needed, such as data from USGS (Landsat, MODIS, etc.), weather models, and high resolution satellite data
Summary
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a European Commission (EC) initiative started in 2015 [1] that aims at the development an infrastructure providing its users with services using and promoting open science practices, such as the FAIR Data principles [2]. Just after the tenders will be closed and the contracts signed in Q1 2020, the EU research community will start consuming the remaining budget on the cloud and EO services that will be on-boarded by the OCRE project In this project, it is important that as many researchers and institutions as possible are able to benefit from the advantages offered by the OCRE project and the National Research and Education Network from each country (national NRENs) have an important role. In the frame of the OCRE H2020 project, several method for requirements gathering have been applied such as interviews, online surveys and user workshops, providing a wider perspective of the researchers’ needs regarding Earth observation services required, which could be on-boarded in OCRE. Some questions, ranging from the general information about the usage of cloud processing services, amount of research based on EO data or average time spent in standard data processing up to more specific questions about the researchers’ trust in commercial services
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