e-IRG Workshop under Czech EU Presidency

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) organises two open workshops every year, each under the auspices of the corresponding EU presidency. During the last years, the e-IRG Workshops have been organised as virtual events due to the Covid-19 pandemic, now the e-IRG Workshop under Czech EU Presidency will be organized as a face-to-face event bringing together all e-IRG stakeholder in Prague. Still, remote participation will be possible. In both cases, registration is required (free of charge).

1. Session 1 - "Coordination and collaboration among European e-Infrastructures - The e-IRG White Paper 2022"
The pre-final version of the e-IRG White Paper 2022 will be presented comprising an analysis of responses to a questionnaire prepared by e-IRG on coordination and collaboration among EU e-Infrastructures.  The questionnaire was sent to the major EU e-Infrastructure initiatives. Further inputs from them will be presented during the session, while feedback from the e-IRG major audiences, namely, the policy makers and funders (including the EC, DG RTD and DG Connect), the e-Infrastructures themselves (commenting also on each others’ views), and the end users.

2. Session 2 - "Energy crisis and e-Infrastructures"

The current energy crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine has an impact on all areas of life and thus also on the Research Infrastructures and e-Infrastructures. RIs and e-Infrastructures are recognised as critical infrastructures, because Research and Innovation (R&I) ecosystems are more and more linked with societal challenges, local economies and the citizens, and are also enablers for development and economic growth. The increasing costs for operations (high energy prices and inflation) and also maintenance (including rising costs for equipment) need to be better understood and addressed. Also, capital expenses are also growing. Projections are difficult and the initial approach of RIs and e-Infrastructures is to reduce their operation time, which has a direct negative impact on R&I. Smaller players such as computing and data centres of universities, research centres and libraries may be in a more difficult situation as their budgets are in many cases limited and their operations are less cost effective than specialised centralised, national or European centres. Also the topic of Green IT and energy efficient data centres is becoming even more relevant. The speakers of this session will reflect on the above topics.

3. Session 3 - "Data Infrastructures and Data Spaces"

Since Data Infrastructures, Spaces and Repositories are indispensable parts of the e-Infrastructure(s) serving the users and accomplishing the European Open Science policy, a dedicated session at the e-IRG Workshop is organised. The presentations will span from policies to the implementation. A main focus will be on the upcoming (thematic) Common European Data Spaces and their interconnection with the existing data infrastructure landscape in the research domain, including EOSC (as the main horizontal Data Space for research and science).

4. Session "Interlinking - interaction between data, publications and PIDs"

Research Data Management (RDM) highlights the (best) practices referring to data-related activities, mostly tied to scientific publications where the data have been used, and contain relevant information such as software, hardware and policies ruling their use and decisions. Data Management Plans (DMPs) capture RDM activities along with the tools, actors and outputs that have managed and produced them, thus gathering all necessary information for research to be explainable and reproducible. FAIR principles, and PIDs in particular, provide unique means for registration, findability and provenance of data and other research outputs. Knowledge Graphs grow by consuming such information in a contextualized manner that allows proper indexing, retrieval, and links to be created across collected scientific information. The session will discuss possible approaches of interlinking and interconnecting services, workflows and outputs in evolving Open and FAIR ecosystems focusing on automations and machine actionability. Experts will reflect on all these topics and on policy approaches for their harmonisation and interoperability. 

Looking forward to a fruitful workshop

Paolo Budroni, e-IRG Chair, Jan Gruntorad, e-IRG co-Chair, 

Fotis Karayannis, Jan Wiebelitz, e-IRG Support Project 

e-IRG (@eirgeu) / Twitter

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A short Communique with a summary of the presentations and discussions of the Workshop can be found below and on Zenodo.