recent posts for D4Science_staff

D4Science's project concepts and practices were presented at the International Conference "Open Access Infrastructures: The Future of Scientific Communication", organized by the National Hellenic Research Foundation, that took place on 15-16 December 2008 in Athens, Greece.

In a dedicated session on "Electronic Infrastructures for Digital Content Repositories and Services", Yannis Ioannidis from the University of Athens, covered the D4Science and DRIVER projects' contribution in the Open Access Infrastructures domain, starting from Digital Repositories, to the Virtual Research Environments and Scientific Data Infrastructures, where the D4Science project fully activates with an emphasis on interoperability and resource sharing.

The 5th Technical Committee (TCom) meeting took place between the 1-5 of December in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting was hosted by CERN (Meyrin site).

A D4Science TCom event is a face-to-face meeting which aims to collectively address any technical issues that arise along the course of the project and to define a concrete plan to properly address them. It is open and flexible, i.e. besides technical partners the whole consortium is potentially invited to attend dependent on the topics to be discussed.

This TCom event primarily focused on (i) analysing the current status of activities, (ii) identifying a short term plan towards the release of the four expected Virtual Research Environments (VREs), i.e. Global Ocean Chlorophyll Monitoring VRE, Global Land Vegetation Monitoring VRE, Fishery Country Profiles Production System VRE, and Integrated Capture Information System VRE and (iii) planning the activities needed to achieve the project goal in the long run.

The meeting consisted of 38 slots some of them occurring in parallel, and discussing the following topics:

• gCube technology: critical bugs, status and next steps;
• gCube technology support for infrastructure population: guidelines and open issues;
• toward gCore 5.0: planned features;
• Production Infrastructure: status and plans;
• Service Activities: status and plan;
• User Community Requirements: feedback on current functionality;
• User Community Requirements: supporting statistical data;
• User Community Requirements: deploying a gCube-based Infrastructure on a single site.

Together with the TCom event, a Project Executive Board (PEB) and a Project Management Board (PMB) meeting took place. During these meetings the members of the governing boards analysed the current status of the project activities, the short and long term plans resulting from the TCom and decided on concrete actions to put in place in the context of the project.

10 out of 11 participating organisations joined the event with a full total of 25 persons in attendance.

Jointly with the TCom, a ‘D4Science – EGEE’ meeting was organised to provide EGEE project representatives with details on the D4Science Infrastructure Monitoring technologies and to analyse the exploitation of such technologies in the context of the EGEE infrastructure.

To make it easier to bookmark and share D4Science information, we have introduced two recent enhancements: the AddThis button and D4Science on Delicious.

The D4Science web site is using the AddThis standard button for bookmarking and sharing. The button makes it easy for visitors to bookmark and share content with others, and it also helps send content to social bookmarking services and social networks.

To use it, simply click the button on the left column of the web site and it will open up a list of sites to publish to. If your favorite site is not on the list, just click on "More…" for other choices.

D4Science is also using Delicious, a social bookmarking service, to provide a quick and easy access to web sites that relate to the project. D4Science bookmarks on Delicious can be found at: http://delicious.com/d4science.

Delicious allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized online source. Delicious is using tags (words) to describe a bookmark. Tag bundles are groups of related tags that one can use to organize tag clouds.

If you have a Delicious account, feel free to suggest links to us that are related to D4Science, e.g. technologies, projects, news, etc. If you don’t, just send us an e-mail with your suggestions/ comments using the contact form.

Donatella Castelli, Project Director of D4Science, was recently interviewed by British Publishers. In the November’s issue of eStrategies Europe on "Europe's new flagship for innovation", you will find the resulting three page article entitled "e-Infrastructures designed for demanding science".

British Publishers now host a digital version of the magazine at http://www.bpldigital.magtank.com/. The publication is available to preview free of charge (the preview includes the D4Science article), or to purchase in full.

The magazine publication eStrategies Europe features opinions, articles and project summaries by the highest level leaders in technology strategies for both the public and private sector. With a targeted high level readership of top level executives, ICT managers, Managing Directors, Ministers, academics and high level administrators the publication holds status with the most influential people in Europe in this arena. With an editorial and online readership in the region of 39,000 the quality of the audience is matched by its breadth of influence.

ICT 2008, Europe’s largest bi-annual ICT research event was the place to be late November 2008. About 4,500 people participated in this event organised by the European Commission's Directorate General for the Information Society and Media. ICT 2008 presented Europe's priorities for ICT research, development and funding. Experts from the world of ICT looked at how Europe can lead the ICT agenda for the next decade.

The ICT 2008 Exhibition showed concrete results of research in and around Europe related to information and communications technologies. ERCIM, D4Science project’s coordinator, had a strong presence through stands and networking sessions.

This event was an excellent occasion to have face-to-face interaction with D4Science collaborating projects (such as BELIEF, CASPAR, EGI_DS…) and the European Commission. Many new contacts were made plus there was plenty of opportunity for fruitful exchanges on project collaboration and dissemination.

Finally thumbs up to our collaborating project Health-e-Child, EGEE supported project connecting paediatrics healthcare professionals with grid technology, which won the ICT 2008 Exhibit Grand Prize worth €10,000.