KRAKOW—The EOSC Federation Build-Up Group is steadily working toward the anticipated launch of the EOSC Federation at the EOSC Symposium in November. The Group met on 17-18 June at the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) to benchmark the progress of the candidate EOSC Nodes, and to agree on the next steps toward launch.
There were notably good vibes, weather and food for the Krakow meeting, and this aligned well with the energetic reports on the progress made over the last three months. In the spotlight were the node-by-node updates on the implementation of their respective use cases and, in some instances, their early efforts to federate with the EOSC EU Node—the reference node launched last October by the European Commission (EC).
The Build-Up Group’s primary objective in developing the Federation’s scientific use cases in time for the EOSC Symposium is to mount a demonstration for the stakeholder community of the added value the EOSC Federation will bring to European research and researchers.
A sunny welcome
The meeting began with a welcome from Aneta Pazik-Aybar, Head of the Open Science Team at NCN, the host of the meeting and the organisation behind the Polish national candidate node, EOSC-PL. EOSC Association (EOSC-A) Secretary General Ute Gunsenheimer and the EC’s Stefan Liebler (of DG Research and Innovation) also welcomed the 60 participants on behalf of their respective organisations. EOSC-A and the EC, together with the EU member states and associated countries, represent the three bodies of the EOSC Partnership’s Tripartite Governance.
In the roll call of node updates, SURF, the service provider coordinating the Dutch national node, stood out by presenting a proof-of-concept demo of their node interface. This set an inspiring standard for the other 12 candidate EOSC Nodes, and set the ball rolling on the second part of the meeting, which served to advance four main areas of implementation, both technical and structural.
Federating capabilities
At the centre of the discussion led by the sub-group on federating capabilities was the milestone release of a paper by the EOSC-A Task Force on EOSC Technical and Semantic Interoperability, EOSC AAI Architecture 2025, published in May. The paper introduces the first interoperability guidelines for implementation of the EOSC Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI), providing a practical guide for the candidate EOSC Nodes to begin onboarding resources to the Federation. Ten candidate nodes are already working toward this integration, while three others will focus on meeting the AAI requirements in order to onboard resources to the EOSC EU Node.
The Federation Build-Up Group is structured as several sub-groups, and the sub-group on service catalogues presented an update on their plans. These include supporting the candidate Nodes to federate their service catalogues with the EU Node to enable discovery, by EOSC users, of the resources offered by the node. The sub-group’s second objective is to identify common interfaces for these catalogues.
Resources
The Build-Up Group’s sub-group on resources gave an update on their work to identify the scientific data repositories—the “resources”—that the candidate EOSC Nodes may wish to onboard. Identifying the repositories will provide an understanding of the requirements necessary to integrate them smoothly into the EOSC Federation.
A component of this work is a file sync-and-share protocol that will enable use of data sets across the Federation, a core functionality of EOSC. Current work includes a pilot deployment across three nodes to put the new EOSC AAI into practice.
Governance
Another sub-group of the Build-Up Group has taken on the responsibility of proposing a first draft for the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will form the basis of each EOSC Node’s commitment to the EOSC Federation. Agreeing on these terms will be an important step forward in establishing the broad strokes of the Federation’s future operational framework.
The EOSC Federation Handbook, published in its first iteration in March of this year, will serve as a primary source for the MoU, though the Handbook itself will undergo a full revision based on the experiences of the candidate Nodes in the lead-up to the Federation’s launch. Several other inputs will factor into the Handbook’s first major revision, and the Handbook sub-group used the Krakow meeting to establish the mechanisms that will enable the group to incorporate feedback from the community.
Use cases
Finally, a consensus was reached on which five scientific use cases the use cases sub-group will investigate in the context of the EOSC Federation in the coming months. The idea is to demonstrate the EOSC Federation’s capabilities and potential impact by showcasing some, if not all, of these at the EOSC Symposium 2025:
- Exploring the impact of marine microbiomes on carbon sequestration;
- Cross-node workflows for the analysis of CERN’s ATLAS/CMS experiment’s open data on the REANA reusable data platform and the processing of imaging data from the environmental and life sciences using the Galaxy platform;
- The photon and neutron federated knowledge finder, PaN-Finder, an AI-enabled data search tool to for navigating the large data sets of European Research Infrastructures;
- A prostate cancer screening tool, MCVAL, that employs multi-centric validation of AI models; and
- The use of genomic sequencing analysis to facilitate cross-border surveillance of anti-microbial resistance.
Next in Helsinki
The meeting ended with a discussion among the participants on the possible criteria and procedures for enrolling future EOSC Nodes, a process that will be led by the EOSC Tripartite Governance.
Though the Build-Up Group meets at least once each month, the next in-person meeting is planned for Helsinki on 01-02 October 2025. This gathering will serve as the final check-in for the 14 nodes before the November Symposium.
