The EGI vessel in the Commission flotilla towards Europe 2020
Sergio Andreozzi navigates the policy sea
This year, coinciding with the launch of EGI.eu, the European Commission (EC) redefined its strategic priorities to turn the EU into a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy delivering high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion. The Commission identified seven flagship initiatives that will commit both the EU and its member states to achieve such priorities by 2020 (Europe 2020). Among these, the 'Innovation Union', the 'Digital Agenda for Europe' and the 'Resource Efficient Europe' are especially relevant to EGI.
The Innovation Union aims to improve access to finance for research and innovation and to ensure that innovative ideas can be turned into products and services that create growth and jobs. The Digital Agenda for Europe is set to maximise the social and economic potential of ICT to improve the daily life of citizens. It identifies a number of barriers (e.g., lack of interoperability, fragmentation of the digital market) that should be addressed to spur innovation. The goal of Resource Efficient Europe is to decouple economic growth from an increasing use of resources, promoting energy efficiency in the process.
What is the role of the EGI vessel in this Commission flotilla? How can EGI shape its actions to underpin a smart, sustainable and inclusive e-Science for the benefit of society?
To answer these key questions, we need to consider the advice that EU policy makers have received from expert groups. In particular, the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data analysed the potential benefits of a collaborative data infrastructure and defined recommendations for setting this up.
The EC Cloud Computing Expert Group investigated the current impact of virtualisation technologies and associated issues, as well as derived business models for provisioning ICT services. The e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG) issued a Blue Paper in response to a request from the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) to examine how e-infrastructures and their users can exploit common services to satisfy their requirements.
By connecting researchers and scientists and enabling them to share their ICT assets, EGI can play a central role in all these areas. In collaboration with other EU-funded projects related to Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs), we already defined a collaboration roadmap to define the interactions and maximise synergies. Interoperability is a key issue and we are working hard to define a standards roadmap, and to encourage technology providers to commit to this vision. Concerning the fragmentation of the digital market, we will concentrate our efforts on simplifying access to scientific data by communities other than those who generate them, enabling widespread use while preserving integrity and ownership.
These are just glimpses of how EGI policies can be aligned to the wider context. The EGI.eu policy team is preparing a detailed report on these topics to inform the community and to support the decision bodies in linking our policy activities to the broader European strategy. The report will be published in the end of the year.
