The Institute of Computer Science (ICS) of FORTH will participate in the European Project BlueCloud.

Blue Economy is an emerging concept which encourages better stewardship of blue resources. It involves all the economic activities related to oceans, seas and coasts and covers a wide range of interlinked established and emerging sectors, such as aquaculture, fisheries, fish processing industry coastal and environmental protection, ocean energy, maritime transport, etc. It aims at improving the human wellbeing and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. The latest years the blue economy in Europe has grown, and by 2017 it was amounted to 180 billion € of gross value added. At the same time, the established sectors in European Blue Economy directly employed over 4 million people in 2017. Despite the great advances in the field, there is still a high potential for further blue growth, especially if we capitalize on already existing infrastructures and delivering the facilities that would enable to make the most of out of them.

BlueCloud - Piloting Innovative Services for Marine Research & the Blue Economy (https://www.blue-cloud.org/), is a new European Project, funded under the H2020 programme, that kicked-off its activities on October 1, 2019. In thirty-six months BlueCloud aims to address the need to build and demonstrate the Pilot Blue Cloud as a thematic EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) to support research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five compelling pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators. Moreover, it seeks to capitalize on what exists already and to develop and deploy, though a pragmatic work plan, the Pilot Blue Cloud as a cyber-platform bringing together and providing access to: (a) multidisciplinary data from observations and models, (b) analytical tools, and (c) computing facilities essential for key blue science use cases. Led by a consortium of experienced and complementary partners, the project maintains a practical approach to address the potential of cloud-based open science to achieve a set of services identifying also longer terms challenges that will provide the basis for a Blue-Cloud Roadmap to serve the wider community. The technological backbone of BlueCloud project is composed of: (a) Virtual Research Environments, (b) Data Access and Discovery services, (c) technical architecture interface with EOSC, and (d) federation of more than 13 infrastructures for data provision and processing.

The Institute of Computer Science (ICS) of FORTH is among the twenty partners of the BlueCloud consortium. More specifically, FORTH-ICS participates through the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) as a technical partner, having an active role in one of the five BlueCloud pilot demonstrators, particularly the demonstrator “Fish, a matter of scale”. The demonstrator will result in improved data management and analytic capabilities for fisheries, by expanding the successful products FAO Tuna Atlas (a web-based interactive mapping tool) and the Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries [GRSF] (a global registry supporting the collaborative production and maintenance of a comprehensive and transparent global reference set of stocks and fisheries records). The expansion will be achieved through the inclusion of information for efficient data analysis, results of approved status assessments of fisheries, as well as exposure of relevant fish food and nutrition information through synergies with the ongoing FishCloud initiative.

A video presenting the initiation of BlueCloud activities (prepared during the project Kick-Off meeting) is available at https://youtu.be/DE0AqgDsxXk

Scientific Responsible for FORTH: Prof. Yannis Tzitzikas