Description
A lot of effort is spent today in projects that develop and maintain e-Infrastructures by federating resources created by to serve specific scientific communities. These e-Infrastructures are usually sustained by leading organizations operating in the same specific scientific domain. These define the policies on the data, select and implement the functionality serving the community needs, guarantee the quality of the service and its overall sustainability. Over the time, these e-Infrastructures become the reference points for what is produced or exploited by the community. Despite the progresses that this federation model offers with respect to ad-hoc solutions, there is growing evidence that the requirements raised by many global research challenges are not always satisfied within the boundaries of a single e-Infrastructure, regardless of how wide in geographical scale and large in aggregate capacity this may prove to be. Rather, the expectation is that in order to face these challenges scientists need to span across multiple infrastructures as they involve resources from different institutions, disciplines, and countries.
This session aims at discussing whether the current e-Infrastructures model can be enhanced towards a more ambitious model based on a network of independent e-Infrastructures, that although independent, over time are be able to co-evolve and collaborate like the components of an eco-system.
The session will be opened by the presentation of two scientific scenarios that will exemplify how much advanced research endeavors need sharing of knowledge and research products generated in different domains. Then, the session will continue with a number of presentations dedicated to describe how current e-Infrastructures contribute today to address the needs experimented in scientific scenarios similar to the presented ones. Finally, the session will be closed by a panel that will focus on discussing whether and under which conditions an "e-Infrastructure ecosystem" can be constructed and to what extent it represents the appropriate solution for enabling the construction of better environments for supporting scientific processes.
