First ESFRI Forum and Training Event

The First ASTERICS DADI ESFRI Forum and Training Event was the first networking event organised around the requirements of the DADI ESFRI projects. The aim was to start collaborations and to identify common topics among the DADI ESFRI and VO partners’ technical staff. The introductory session allowed for familiarizing with the WP goals on data access, discovery and interoperability, while the subsequent discussion sessions allowed to identify the first needs and requirements of the various projects, with the goal of sharing efforts and best practices. This is a crucial point for a more efficient usage of the resources available to each project.

Since DADI is dedicated to data access, discovery and interoperability, the topics for discussion proved to be a mixture of data provider needs in data distribution, resource discovery, data policy enforcement, multi-dimensional resource consuming, and time domain data and alerts issuing. All of these topics were discussed both in terms of custom implementation practices and as VO recommendation for usability and improvement.

To shorten the out-of-office time for the Forum's participants, a one-day-and-a-half schedule was defined, letting breaks between sessions and a working dinner fill the need for direct contact between the participants. This proved useful to set up personal contacts to disseminate, e.g., the VO experience and lessons learnt among ESFRI projects' technical staff.

The Forum and Training event's objectives were reached allowing for a preliminary networking phase among ESFRI projects and VO partners, built upon the preceding Technology Forum in Strasbourg and preparing the next Technology Forum in Edinburgh. The meeting was dedicated to requirement gathering rather than actual technical collaboration, which will be more the topic for the Technology Forum. 

Among the topics addressed, a great deal of discussion was devoted to data access on multi-dimensional data and the time domain, allowing for multi-messenger scientific research, and also to data policies enforcement, in terms of authentication and authorization for users. This latter topic involves privileged/priority access to scientific data before public release, but also to properly manage computational resources for the various projects. Another topic was data discovery and interoperability through the registry of resources.

The next meetings of interest to the DADI initiatives will include the 7th RDA Plenary meeting, to be held in Tokyo 1-3 March 2016, and the IVOA “Northern Spring” Interoperability meeting, which will take place in Cape Town in May 2016. Preparation of the IVOA meeting will be a discussion topic for the oncoming WP4 deliverable, the Second Technology Forum (Edinburgh, 7-8 March 2016).

A second ESFRI Forum and Training Event is scheduled at M31 (end of 2017) and should finalize ESFRI project requirements as they will be better defined and collected in the progress of the ASTERICS DADI work, thus moving from a preliminary gathering meeting (this Forum/Deliverable) to a real delivery of requirements for software and standards (next one). That event will also include more “training” aspects adapted to the ESFRI needs. A parallel view of the data provider requirements inclusive of also the non-ESFRI projects and European astrophysical data centres will be pursued by the First European Data Provider Forum and Training Event, held in Heidelberg on 15-16 June 2016.

More information on the school logistics, including the program can be found on the wiki.