EGI Foundation

About EGI Foundation

The Stichting EGI Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation established under Dutch law to coordinate and manage the EGI Infrastructure federation on behalf of its members: national e-Infrastructures (NGIs) and European Intergovernmental Research Organisations (EIROs).

EGI supports research collaborations by providing four solutions for management and analysis of research data (http://www.egi.eu/solutions/): federated High Throughput Computing, federated Cloud Computing, federated Operations and Community-driven Innovation and Support.

Through its solutions EGI promotes the Open Science Commons Vision (http://go.egi.eu/osc) according to which researchers from all disciplines have easy, integrated and open access to the advanced digital services, scientific instruments, data, knowledge and expertise they need to collaborate to achieve excellence in science, research and innovation. The Open Science Commons includes the "Data Commons" according to which data, which is the subject matter for research, should be dealt with according to the principles of open access and open science, while maintaining trust and privacy for researchers.

EGI and RDA

Within RDA, EGI brings experience in generic data fabric services for data management, data transfer and bringing data close to computation for processing, use and re-use. As multidisciplinary e-Infrastructure EGI contributes to RDA in various areas:

1) Data standards harmonization of existing standards: EGI will report experience on interoperability testing of services of the EGI platforms and those offered by research infrastructures and other data infrastructures such as the community-specific repositories and generic data infrastructures. Adoption of standards is fostered via the porting of community-specific services to standard-based e-Infrastructure services.

2) Data sharing, exchange, interoperability, usability and re-usability. The EGI e-Infrastructure Commons provides a a federated cloud infrastructure in which open reasearch data and big data can be hosted and made available to experimental applications for processing and reuse. EGI will adopt existing solutions, prototype new ones and share its technical platforms.

3) Greater discoverability of research data sets: EGI will contribute to the gathering of requirements from users and service providers and to the design and prototyping of a data service registry and marketplace.

4) Realization of the data scientist profession. As part of the Open Science Commons, EGI is committed to the realization of the ‘Knowledge Commons’ which represents the community knowledge and understanding needed to conduct e-Science, including the needs for data science. The Knowledge commons concept include the capability to easily share and access knowledge, training facilities, open source software, and other digital assets necessary for Open Science by federating training and education programmes.