Vision and Ambition for LifeWatch ICT Infrastructure Axel Poigné (Fraunhofer IAIS) Vera Hernández-Ernst (Fraunhofer IAIS) Alex Hardisty (Cardiff University) Hans Voss (Fraunhofer IAIS) Walter Berendsohn (BGBM)

What is LifeWatch? A European Research Infrastructure for Biodiversity Research (ESFRI –Project) –Distributed observatories / sensors –Databases, processing and analytical tools –Computational capability and capacity –Collaborative environments –Support, training, partnering, fellowship

initial decision final decision logistics construction Earlier projectsConceptionPreparationsConstruction Operation & Evolution Construction ‘blue print’ Political commitment 5 M€~ 386 M€ Status: The LifeWatch Timeline

Countries Scientific networks Data networks User sectors 27 executive partners Industry International infrastructures Contracted participants Other partners Status: The Preparatory Project 8 countries negotiating the start-up 8 countries negotiating the start-up

Vision: the LifeWatch ICT Infrastructure shall … be a federated Europe-wide distributed system be an interoperable access (and publishing) mechanism of data and services from a variety of sources Be a mean of processing and scaling-up biodiversity data Support the full eLab lifecycle be a collaborative environment be a one-stop portal application provide computational resources (Grid / Cloud) … For scientists: provides the means for in-silico science For scientists: provides the means for in-silico science

… support the eLab Lifecycle Discovery Acquistion Preparation/Cleaning Transformation/Fusion Interpretation Dissemination Curation Provenance Identity & Naming Security/Access Lifecyle (*) (*) De Roure & Goble, "Software Design for Empowering Scientists," IEEE Software, vol. 26, 2009

… a collaborative environment (*) AdHoc Software (

Challenges (and solutions) HETEROGENEITY of the community’s requirements, its data resources and tools GAP between current practice and future vision SCALE of implementation of a pan- European infrastructure, €386m, >25,000 users PACE of innovation in ICTs FIT with mainstream industry and Higher Education / Research sector directions for ICT service

Challenge of HETEROGENEITY: Interconnected nature of biodiversity ideas, outputs, repositories From Peterson et al (2010), Syst Biodivers 8(2), From Guralnick and Hill (2010),

Solution for HETEROGENEITY: SOA approach First level of Interoperability by relying on standards and rules First level of Interoperability by relying on standards and rules

Genome annotations Genome annotations GO Model organisms Model organisms NCBI Taxonomy Genetic knowledge bases OMIM Other subdomains Other subdomains … Anatomy FMA UMLS Addison Disease (id:D000224) Addison's disease (id: ) Biomedical literature Biomedical literature MeSH Clinical repositories Clinical repositories SNOMED CT UMLS C Solution for HETEROGENEITY: Semantic interoperability through knowledge management Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) from: Olivier Bodenreider, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Comunications, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

Challenges (and solutions) HETEROGENEITY of the community’s requirements, its data resources and tools GAP between current practice and future vision SCALE of implementation of a pan- European infrastructure, €386m, >25,000 users PACE of innovation in ICTs FIT with mainstream industry and Higher Education / Research sector directions for ICT service

Terrestrial Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites Marine reference and focal sites Natural science collections Challenge of SCALE: Users and data generators in the large Networks of Excellence + - Climate data - Soil data - Space observation data - Socio-economic data Climate data - Soil data - Space observation data - Socio-economic data -...

Challenge of SCALE: Distributed System Construction LifeWatch ICT Infrastructure LifeWatch Developer

SCALE solution: Thinking globally, acting locally Organisation –Top-down financial and legal governance model –Project Office Technical direction and governance –LifeWatch Reference Model –Processes to support compliance –Bottom-up community governance model Core ICT infrastructure Management of the product –Product Management Board & Release strategy Support to the community –Service Centre(s), Technical operations support

5 challenges (and 5+ solutions) HETEROGENEITY of the community’s requirements, its data resources and tools GAP between current practice and future vision SCALE of implementation of a pan- European infrastructure, €386m, >25,000 users PACE of innovation in ICTs FIT with mainstream industry and Higher Education / Research sector directions for ICT service

PACE solution: Divorce functionalities from technologies LifeWatch Reference Model

Example: Catalogue Service OGC/INSPIRE conformant

A The Ambition : A Solid Construction Portal Virtual Collaborative environments AA Security Access to external Services ProvenanceProvenance Catalogue(s) Annotations Services Semantic Mediation PublicationPublication Computational Resources Workflows

Outlook LifeWatch shall enable a new level of Biodiversity Research