Q&A from the EOSC Portal virtual meeting for service providers

EOSC Enhance hosted a virtual meeting on 11 May 2021 to share the latest developments of the EOSC Portal with service providers, in order to collect feedback from them towards to the next iteration of the EOSC Portal due in autumn 2021.

The meeting opened with a brief overview of the EOSC Enhance project offered by Federico Drago (Trust-IT Services), followed by in-depth presentations by Jorge Sanchez (JNP) and George Papastefanatos (University of Athens).

More than 70 participants in the audience had the opportunity to discover what's new in the EOSC Portal in terms of specifications and processes, as well as of profiles and APIs.

Check out the presentations at this link

Q&A Session

A brief interactive session in which attendees were asked to provide opinions and insights about the current features and their expectations towards the future developments of the Providers Dashboard, before opening up the floor to questions. Here we have collected some of the most interesting, in case you missed the meeting.

• Q: Is it possible for a Service Provider to follow onboarding stages, how far the registration progressed?

  • A: Yes, the provider has a dashboard to monitor all the process and progress and receives additional communication (via email) when the steps are achieved.

• Q: How could someone download the resource template for offline reviewing?

  • A: At this link you can find the Provider Profile and the Resource Profile https://eosc-portal.eu/providers-documentation 

• Q: When I am a Service provider, filling in the resource template, can I download the template with the filled-in information for reviewing by e.g. other colleagues?

  • A:  It is possible to include many colleagues as Administrators of the Provider/Resources Profiles and they can all review at the dashboard.

• Q: Is the process different for providers who are already registered in EOSC Portal? 

  • A: The Onboarding Process is the same for existing and new providers. If there is a change in the Onboarding or Profiles Specification that affects a Provider or a Resource description or requires a validation by the Provider they are informed to visit and validate

• Q: Is there no transfer of information from the existing EOSC Portal? Do we need to begin again?

  • A: All Profiles already onboarded and validated have been adapted and transferred.

• Q: What does validate mean? What is its outcome, why would I do this? (https://providers.eosc-portal.eu/openapi : POST /resource/validate)

  • A: Validation means the process where a resource or a provider entry is checked for compliance with the EOSC Profiles schema and some validation checks are performed (data format, etc). This method does not insert\update the entry in the catalogue. It only performs the validation and responds back with errors or success.

• Q: Providers may be complex SoS. In this case, it is important to represent the relationships among providers. It seems to me that it is not yet possible to say that a service S1 is managed by the service provider SP1 but it is operated by the SP2. Could you consider this requirement and extend the provider profile?

  • A: We have managed to cover that requirement. The Resource Profile https://eosc-portal.eu/providers-documentation/eosc-provider-portal-resource-profile includes the ERP.BAI.2 Resource Organisation and the ERP.BAI.3 Resource Providers in the Basic Information Block

• Is it possible to organise a webinar with some hands-on and best practising for onboarding?

  • The EOSC Enhance team is currently offering these upon request, please contact us via onboarding@eosc-portal.eu

• Q: What are providers expected to do whenever the provider or resource profile changes? Are we required to conform to the new schema? 

  • All changes planned to be performed will be pre-announced and will be backwards compatible. In case there is a need to update the entries the Providers will be informed.    

• Q: Does a method to import and share whole service catalogues from in one-go already exist? Simplifying the service onboarding for provider consortia.

  • Yes the process has been drafted and currently is verified through a pilot project. It is expected to be available by the end of July 2021.

• Q: Resource profiles as we stand now seem to be biased towards services. What are your plans for different types of resources?

  • Currently we are working to include Profiles for Data Sources and Research products, which are expected to be available late June 2021.

Become an EOSC Portal service provider

Check out the "Using the Portal" section