Building an International FAIR Infrastructure for Uniting Research Data

Over the past ~6 years, a budding community of NREN and discipline operators ofsynch&share stores has popped up. These operators typically run one of [ownCloud, seafile,NextCloud, PowerFolder]. Judging by site surveys presented at consecutive synch&sharefocused CS31conferences, their services have all become runaway successes – it’s notunusual for these stores to be in the PB range and to serve tens of thousands of realresearchers and their real research data. The next wave of open science policy, however,tells us that data shouldn’t be locked inside a single vault – instead it needs to beinterlinked, citable, free to move; in short, FAIR. The CS3 community have always beenworking towards enabling interlinking of the data between stores at the identity andmetadata levels. An open protocol was developed to announce, accept and propagateshared volumes from one installation to another. This protocol is called OpenCloudMesh2and is by now supported by most synch&share software vendors. So, we have the installedbase, the incentive to interlink, and the technology to interlink. We just haven’t taken actuallinking beyond proof of concept yet; not in an operational, sustainable way in any case.A proposal: interlink synch&share stores into a new pan-european data eInfrastructureWe were informed in late 2018 that the EC had put out a call for the development ofinnovative science cloud eInfrastructures, called InfraEOSC-023. This call matched surprisingly well with our intents. A few guidelines from the call mayillustrate this. Imagine you have interlinked sets of synch&share nodes, and that data can be freely requested and mounted between them. Now think how well you’re placed to answerthese challenges from the call:Highlights • innovative models of collaboration that genuinely include incentive mechanisms for auser oriented open science approach • develop innovative services that address relevant aspects of the research data cycle(from inception to publication, curation, preservation and reuse), • allowing implementation of new scientific data-related developments and intelligentlinking and discovering of all research artefacts • foster interdisciplinary research, serving a wider remit of research needs, as well asnew users like industry and the public sector. A consortium has now been formed to deliver this project and is made up of ~10eInfrastructure providers (NRENs, landmark instruments etc.), most in Europe, but AARNet isalso a contributor through their Cloudstor Services. The project shall be delivered not from ablank slate, but rather building on an existing set of services already operated and inwidespread use among end users at the participant sites. This proposal does not focus ondevelopment of software for a new infrastructure; rather, it is about systems integratingexisting components to deliver added value to the existing and active participants of the CS3and GEANT communities.The resultant eInfrastructure will be established by interfederating exiting stores into a fabricof “federated sites” based on federation mechanisms, operational routines and trust.Federative best practices learned from EduGAIN and EduRoam will be adopted and applied.This presentation will present the building blocks for the project, the conditions to considerto make this a success and the proposed milestones and invite additional internationalcollaborators.