EUDAT

BlueBRIDGE has been invited to contribute to the first EUDAT Summer School on Research Data Management, held from the 3-7 July 2017 in Heraklion, Greece at the premises of FORTH, one of the BlueBRIDGE partners. BlueBRIDGE contributed to the  Summer School with the presentation Semantic Integration of Data in the Marine Domain and Beyond which fitted very well in the work EUDAT is doing on ontologies.

FORTH

FORTH and CNR entered in signing a Service Level Agreement, that grants limited access to CNR in using proprietary software developed by FORTH. More specifically, the agreement defines that CNR is allowed to use the binaries of MatWare software (version 3.0) only for the purposes of operating the Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries VRE powered by the D4Science infrastructure. MatWare is a framework, developed by FORTH, that automates the process of constructing semantic warehouses. It is capable of automatically fetching the contents from the underlying data sources using several access methods (i.e. SPARQL endpoints, HTTP-accessible files, JDBC, etc.), transforming them into RDF descriptions with respect to a top level ontology, ingest them into a semantic warehouse, and evaluate its connectivity by exploiting a connectivity metrics.

RDA

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) was launched as a community-driven organization in 2013 by the European Commission, the United States Government's National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation with the goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing of data.   With more than to 6,700 members from 136 countries (March 2018), RDA provides a neutral space where its members can come together through focused global Working and Interest Groups to develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing and data-driven research, and accelerate the growth of a cohesive data community that integrates contributors across domain, research, national, geographical and generational boundaries.

EMODnet

BlueBRIDGE has engaged with EMODnet for the organisation of the RDA-Europe Datathon. The scope of the engagement was related to the integration of the Seabed Habitats datasets (classified habitat descriptors) in the BlueBRIDGE infrastructure to increase the data offer via the BlueBRIDGE infrastructure for the datathon participants. After the datathon BlueBRIDGE has been invited at the launch event of the EMODnet SeaDataLab hackathon contributing to the panel 'From Open Data to Innovation –  How to increase the flow?'. The panel focused on open data, the existing barriers in data sharing and inspired the hackathon participants with examples of applications built on open data. The collaboration with EMODnet is currently continuing in the Common Dissemination Booster (CDB).

NATIONAL KAPODISTRIAN UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS (NKUA)/DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATICS AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Since the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of NKUA is a principal BlueBRIDGE partner and the NKUA BlueBRIDGE coordinator is the full professor, Prof. Yannis Ioannidis, special attention has been given to the knowledge transfer of the BlueBRIDGE technology, knowledge and results to dedicated training courses where the dedicated AquacultureTraining lab VRE has been presented and been experimented by a significant number of students.

WECAFC-FIRMS

FAO has set up different VREs to support WECAFC-FIRMS on different topics (RDB for data collection, harmonization and sharing, WECAFC FIRMS VRE for data elaboration and sharing).  These VREs have been presented and discussed with regional partners during WECAFC meetings.

With NOAA a collaboration focused on the development of fisheries data assessment methods that focus on data poor situation that are common in the region. The objectives of the collaboration is to review and analyse methodological issues related to the collation and harmonization of the assessment of the status of species in the region.

SeaDataCloud

The SeaDataCloud infrastructure hosts a service to geographically interpolate scattered observations reported by floats in the global oceans (e.g. ARGO and Copernicus data). This service is based on the Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis (DIVA) model. BlueBRIDGE started a scientific collaboration to make the BlueBRIDGE cloud computing platform (DataMiner) interoperate with the SeaDataCloud DIVA interpolation service. The final result was a service in DataMiner able to receive scattered environmental observation data from the Copernicus repository and produce an interpolated distribution of the environmental parameter. This service adds several Open Science-oriented features to the SeaDataNet service, e.g. provenance management, multi-tenancy, reusability-repeatability-reproducibility of the experiments, accounting, security, data sharing and standardization. The SeaDataCloud staff provided facilities that enhanced the interoperability with the BlueBRIDGE computational facilities, e.g. the possibility to feed the model with information about ocean-currents velocities, automatic signal-to-noise-ratio calculation, enhancement of the computational hardware to support DIVA etc.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON (SEATTLE) – RAM LEGACY DATABASE

The GRSF VRE was conceived to specifically address the needs of the community around the global assessment of stocks and fisheries. With FAO, FORTH and ENG, this VRE now provides a unified overview of RAM, SFP, and FAO information related to stocks and fisheries.  The entire process, from requirements analysis through development and community review has completed and the BleuBRIDGE data service including the VRE and public catalogues are now under review for uptake through the FAO FIRMS partnership under a co-funding arrangement for which the documentation has been prepared by FAO.

UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY/DEPARTMENT OF ICHTHYOLOGY & AQUATIC ENVIRONMENT (DIAE)

Strong relationships in terms of academic, research and training activities have been established between the BlueBRIDGE project and its partners with University of Thessaly and especially with the Department of Ichthyology & Aquatic Environment (DIAE). Professors and undergraduate and postgraduate students from the department participated in the various workshops organised by BlueBRIDGE such as the RDA-Europe / BlueBRIDGE Datathon on Fisheries and Aquaculture and the one-day workshop on aquaculture solutions. A specialised training course in the Department of Ichthyology & Aquatic Environment (DIAE) presenting the challenges and solutions of BlueBRIDGE has taken place in December 2017 where 102 participants, professors and students have experimented the Sustainable Blue Economy VRE.

UPMC

In November 2015, UPMC hosted a hands-on lecture about techniques for biodiversity conservation based on the Cloud computing, modelling and data sharing facilities provided by a dedicated BlueBRIDGE VRE. The course targeted master students in Oceanography. It is worth highlighting that this course was held when France was in a state of war and it was also symbolic for the University to demonstrate that they continued to be open to collaborations with other EU institutes although the tragic events of the 13th of November (very few days before the course).