EOSC Enhance is a 24-month project funded by the European Commission and tasked with progressing the vision for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It kicked off in December 2019 and ran until November 2021.
As a trusted virtual environment enabling the data-driven, cross-disciplinary Open Science which holds the key to advances in research and innovation, EOSC offered some 1.7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science, technology, and the humanities and social sciences a single access point to data services spanning the full data life cycle. This has been achieved by federating existing research infrastructures currently dispersed across disciplines and states.
During the lifetime of EOSC Enhance, project partners developed and improved the functionality of the EOSC Portal, further augmenting the catalogue of services assembled to date, and connecting independent, thematic data clouds for the benefit of users and service providers across Europe.
These objectives were achieved via wide-ranging stakeholder consultation and in close collaboration with the EOSC Governance. Users, service providers and existing EOSC-related projects played an active role in the co-design of the portal specifications.
With a laser focus on facilitating the interoperability and discoverability of services and resources across scientific disciplines, we have applied the emerging EOSC Rules of Participation, using specifications, guidelines, tools, and APIs to link service and resource providers.
Objectives
Enhancing the service provider interface and incorporating new services and resources into the EOSC catalogue
Accelerating the deployment and uptake of EOSC services and resources
Increasing user demand for EOSC services and resources via Portal improvements and development
Enabling open access to services and data across thematic clouds
Staged Approach
Analysis of the current state-of-play through mapping existing portal access points, services and resources, and stakeholders, and then identifying gaps, linkages, and potential enhancements
Requirements gathering, prioritisation of continuously evolving needs, and conceptual development of processes, specifications, guidelines, tools, and APIs
Documentation of functional specifications and architecture, development of software, and definition of APIs offering low-integration costs combined with interoperability and enhanced user experience, visibility, findability and accessibility
Release, validation and upload to the EOSC Portal of software that meets the prerequisites of attractiveness, usefulness, enhancement, inclusion, and orientation to the future
Who we engage
End-users, who are at the centre of EOSC, will benefit from user-oriented, pragmatic services and solutions. Users will have the opportunity to shape the EOSC Portal functionalities by providing requirements and feedback to the Enhance partner consortium.
Service and resource providers, through EOSC Enhance, will better understand user requirements, and will be able to collaborate with the consortium partners to co-develop the functionality which maximises usage of the Portal.
EOSC Initiatives & Governance focusing on the EOSC Portal will be a key source of information and guidance for the EOSC Enhance project. Policy makers and funders can follow the evolution of the Portal to understand how it will impact and support the European research sector in the future.
Consortium
Members of the EOSC Enhance partner consortium, which will be led by the University of Athens, include EFIS Centre, JNP, CYFRONET, the University of Manchester, EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, and OpenAIRE as well as representatives from each of the ESFRI Cluster projects - ICOS, CESSDA, CNRS-LAPP, EMBL, and ILL. Responsibility for project communications and stakeholder engagement has been entrusted to Trust-IT Services.
EOSC Enhance has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 871160.