Useful documentation

EU links

Europe actively supports an innovative way of conducting scientific research by the creation of a new environment for academic and industrial research in which 'virtual communities' share, federate and exploit the collective power of European scientific facilities. 'e-Infrastructure' refers to this new research environment in which all researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or as part of national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world.On CORDIS website, you may find news aboutwork programmes, calls, projects, events, publications.

Official Website of the European Commission focussed on the Digital Agenda for Europe, rich of documentations and news.

Specific portal for the Digital Heritage, managed by Belspo and STIS.

e-IRG documents

The main objective of the e-Infrastructure initiative is to support the creation of a political, technological and administrative framework for an easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe. Particular attention is directed towards grid computing, storage, and networking. 

e-Infrastructure governance: From management and international aspects, to legal and financial issues; Future of Research Networking; Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting; Energy and Green IT; Exascale computing and related software; e-Infrastructure services; Data infrastructures
In October 2009 ESFRI invited the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) to produce a report, or “Blue Paper”, on e-Infrastructure services, enabling more efficient e-Infrastructure support for the science that is done by the ESFRI projects. This Blue Paper was delivered to ESFRI at the end of June 2010, and endorsed by the ESFRI plenum at the ESFRI delegates meeting, on Friday 24 October 2010.
The e-IRG White Paper is a live document summarising on-going discussions around key e-Infrastructure areas and topics that require immediate policy actions. It serves as a means to summarise analysis and dialogs by relevant stakeholders and forms the basis for proposing formal e-IRG recommendations at the national and EU levels. The topics of this e-IRG White Paper result from several rounds of reflections in a consultation process that encompassed large parts of the e-Infrastructure community.

Recommandations on Global collaboration; Education and Training in the Use of e-Infrastructure; Grid and Cloud Computing; aSecurity: A “holistic” approach; Service-centric e-Infrastructures through virtualisation; Remote Instrumentation; Sustainability of the computing-related e-Infrastructure.

The following report is divided into three parts: a survey of existing data management initiatives, metadata and quality, and interoperability issues in data management. The report ends with conclusions of the study and a set of proposed recommendations for further analysis and discussion by the e-IRG. This work is part of a continuous analysis of the scientific data situation, started initially with various contributions from the European Commission (communication published in February 2007, OECD position about scientific
data status, published in 2007 and ESFRI position paper about Digital Repositories in September 2007).
The role of the roadmap in this process is to provide a vision of the future and to motivate continued efforts to create links between different stakeholders in a way that maximises the socioeconomic value of the common e-Infrastructure for research. As the example of the World Wide Web has shown, the junction of leading-edge technologies and research is a very fertile ground for new groundbreaking innovations. The roadmap will also outline the role e-IRG wants to play in this development and how the organisation plans to execute its mission if the recommendations to the external stakeholders are heard and followed up at a higher policy level.