The European Commission awards the AquaINFRA Project 7,6 million Euro to develop an EOSC compliant innovative interaction platform for restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters

The AquaINFRA project is going to support the ongoing development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as an overarching research infrastructure, and the overall objective of the 4-year project is to develop the AquaINFRA Interaction Platform equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders in restoring healthy oceans, coastal and inland waters.

The 21 partner International consortium, led by Aalborg University, Department of Planning, will develop an innovative AquaINFRA Interaction Platform (AIP), which will allow seamless data discovery and processing through a single interface.

The AIP will be the central gateway for scientific communities in the aquatic realm to interact seamlessly with European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the EU flagship initiative aimed at enabling Open Science practices in Europe. This will include the development of a cross-domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism, as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments (VREs). 

The AquaINFRA VRE will enable stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and information from their own discipline, as well as across research infrastructures, disciplines, and national borders. AquaINFRA will address the specific needs for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across the two domains. A set of strategic use cases, including use cases in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea, as well as a Pan-European use case will provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities.

Besides contributing to the use and uptake of EOSC as the overarching European research infrastructure, the AquaINFRA project will be carried out in close collaboration with the sister project BlueCloud26 and other flagship projects as ILIAD and EDITO Digital Twins of the Ocean.

The project started on the 1st January 2023.