SIENA Standards & Interoperability for eInfrastructure implementation initiative

Brief description

The SIENA initiative placed emphasis on being extremely active in forming relationships with existing projects and standards groups, acting as a catalyst in promoting standards to a wide range of stakeholders from the public and private sectors in Europe and globally. The primary focus of the SIENA initiative is European electronic infrastructure (e-infrastructures) for research. It has therefore, taken into consideration the points of view of both the people responsible for infrastructure creation and operation, such as service and application developers, and the “end users”, for example, researchers in science, the arts and humanities. The focus on standards and interoperability and the offer of services through European grid and cloud infrastructures aims to benefit the education sector, and will also be relevant for e-government and commercial enterprises that can take advantage of the substantial research background that underlies most e-infrastructures.
 

Our Role

Trust-IT was Technical Coordinator of SIENA co-authoring the main output:  the SIENA Roadmap on Distributed Computing Infrastructure for e-Science and Beyond (June 2012) officially endorsed by the EC (statement from Neelie Kroes, VP of the EC). 

SIENA was the first initiative to bring to the same table standards groups to support the analysis of open standards-based interoperable grid and cloud computing infrastructures that  helped Trust-IT spearhead the Cloudscape event series. The first editions Cloudscape I – Jan 2009, Cloudscape II – Feb 2010, Cloudscape III – March 2011 were organised under the SIENA umbrella. 

Impact

ICT Standardisation has dramatically changed over the last decades. Alongside traditional standardization organisations, specialized and mostly global fora and consortia have emerged as world leading ICT standard development bodies that are developing the vast majority of standards for the internet, the World Wide Web and for cloud computing, cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT and Blockchain. Standards are increasingly seen as a bridge between research, innovation, and the market, and as a means of capturing and disseminating knowledge and SIENA helped Trust-IT in delivering expertise, together with experts on concrete implementation for cloud security, 5G and developing a relevant #StandardsWatch through StandICT.eu, still active today, that aims to be a one stop environment to demonstrate that standardisation activity supports a global market creating opportunities for European businesses and consumers and it is achieved via the most appropriate routes and organisations.

 

Results

The principal output of the project was the delivery of the SIENA Roadmap on Distributed Computing Infrastructure for eScience and Beyond in Europe.