2 minutes reading time (426 words)

eInfraCentral – Helping users discover and access Europe’s e-infrastructure services

eInfraCentral brings researchers the catalogue of various European e-services. The beta version of the eInfraCentral gateway is available for browsing without registration: http://beta.einfracentral.eu
eInfraCentral was set up in 2017 to ensure that by 2020 a broader and more varied set of users (including industry) discovers and accesses the existing and developing e-infrastructure capacity. This is done via the creation of a common service catalogue in collaboration with Europe’s leading e-infrastructures (EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, OpenAIRE, PRACE) and the development of a portal through which to access it.

eInfraCentral has developed a service catalogue template that is now adopted as a ‘standard’ by EU funded e-infrastructure projects and is fostering an alignment of service descriptions. Managers of services can use it to improve their service presentation and management and eInfraCentral is organising webinars to support this process. The quality of the service catalogue is ensured via the neutrality of the eInfraCentral consortium partners. By avoiding conflict of interest, the project team guarantees the objectivity and trustworthiness of the service catalogue.
The eInfraCentral Portal aims to help researchers find information about a broad range of e-infrastructure services they may be interested in, discover new ones, compare various service offerings in one place, and assess the relevance of the offered services by rating them and leaving feedback.

Selected metrics on service level targets will also be displayed to inform users about the quality of the services available. In addition, metrics from the use of the portal will be fed back to the service providers to help them improve their services.

Along with OpenAIRE-Advance and EOSC-hub, eInfraCentral is one of the key building blocks of the future EOSC Portal as recognised in the European Commission’s Implementation Roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud (March 2018). The ‘European Open Science Cloud’ (EOSC) initiative of the European Commission aims to provide European science, industry, and public authorities with world-class digital infrastructure that bring state of the art computing and data storage capacity to scientists and engineers in the European Union. The eInfraCentral team is working with colleagues from these related projects to develop the EOSC service catalogue and portal.
Registration of services and setting up user profiles will shortly be possible on the eInfra Portal. In the meantime, to find out more about eInfraCentral and for more information on planned events, sign up for our newsletter, check the project website or follow the developments on Twitter: @eInfraCentral
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731049.

Tags:

featured