Next 7-9 February join the Blue-Cloud Hackathon: come and test the European marine thematic platform to demonstrate the potential of Open Science for ocean sustainability

Mankind has been collecting marine data since centuries and in the last decades Europe has been building a landscape for marine data management where marine operators collaborate with e-infrastructures to collect and make blue data ready for further use to the end users, researchers across Europe. 

Blue-Cloud is the flagship initiative of the H2020 Future of the seas and oceans programme of the European Commission and it positions itself with a very precise role within the European marine research landscape: Blue-Cloud acts as a federator of the existing infrastructures - both data and software infrastructures - responsible for the blue data offer in Europe.

Blue-Cloud is federating leading European horizontal e-infrastructures (e.g. EUDAT & D4Science, Copernicus DIAS, WeKeo), with long-term marine data management infrastructures to create a trusted virtual space - the Blue-Cloud Technical Framework - where scientists can access the ocean data, tools, services and research outputs they need to perform research in a more efficient way. In this way Blue-Cloud goes one step higher by seeking to combine output from all these facilities and make them available for multi-disciplinary web-based science.

As of today, we count 750 users coming from different research institutes in Europe using the main assets of the Blue-Cloud platform. The Data Discovery and access service, the brand-new facility that allows data retrieval and that so far give access to more than 10.5 million data sets and a few thousand data collections and derived data products from 9 different data providers. The Virtual Research Environment which provides a range of computing and analytical services for constructing, hosting and operating Virtual Labs for specific applications. And the Blue-Cloud Virtual Labs, configured to serve five Demonstrators in biodiversity, genomics, environment, fisheries and acquaculture domains.

All this demonstrates the potential of open science thanks to this smart federation of data, tools and computing facilities. And it’s a recent news of these days that a first new Virtual Lab has just been added to the Blue-Cloud environment, the JERICO CORE Virtual Lab which is a pilot integration between Blue-Cloud VRE and the Coastal Oceans Resource Environment lead by the JERICO CORE initiative.

The Blue-Cloud Hackathon

The Blue-Cloud platform is open to new communities in the marine and blue research to test the services and get tailored support for their needs. The very next opportunity to get the feeling of what Blue-Cloud offers will be the Hackathon, an open invitation to marine scientists & researchers, data scientists, ICT experts, innovators, students, and anyone who is passionate about the Ocean to explore and test Blue-Cloud.

Participants will be challenged to develop applications that contribute to improving knowledge of marine ecosystems; support the transition to a greener, blue economy; advance ocean literacy; and/or enhance international collaboration towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030.

Join us in the Blue-Cloud Hackathon kick-off event! Learn about Blue-Cloud, gain insight into the hackathon objectives & challenges, find out what we have in store for hackathon participants and be inspired to decode the Ocean!

Article by

Sara Pittonet Gaiarin
Senior Project Manager at Trust-IT Services
Blue-Cloud Project Coordinator