EuroScienceGateway at the EOSCxNFDI joint symposium Berlin 2024

The Galaxy Europe team, as a key partner in the EU-funded EOSC EuroScienceGateway project, attended the EOSC Symposium 2024 from October 21st to 23rd, 2024, in Berlin, Germany. This event was co-located with NFDI communities to foster collaboration among the target groups.

On the first day, during the INFRAEOSC projects: Early results and future plans for the common collaboration areas session, Björn presented the main goals of Opportunity Area Expert Group 4 (OA4), which is about User and Resource Environment. The primary goal of this OA is to assist in standardizing and promoting the progress of systems and virtual research environments (VRE) services. This enables projects to speed up specific advancements, collaborate on bigger challenges, and establish cutting-edge EOSC application cases. Following EOSC's key values and the "reuse now, rebuild later" approach. The OA4 working group, taking into consideration their shared interest in VRE, decided to share details about the major challenges, the latest developments, and the challenges that could be addressed by collaborative efforts. The OA4 team is also able to serve as a technical validator, testing and consolidating solutions to support the work of the EOSC-A Task Forces. Important contributions of the OA4 to the EOSC Landscape are:

• Improve user environments to increase EOSC end-users across disciplines (such as Life Sciences, Climate, and Biodiversity).
• Utilize resource environments to provide diverse solutions using tools, services, and infrastructures accessible from EOSC providers like Galaxy and EGI.
• Integrate with EOSC Exchange horizontal services (such as IaaS, SaaS) procured on the EOSC EU Platform.
• Share VRE guidelines and a common training architecture across INFRAEOSC projects (TIaaS - Training Infrastructure as a Service).
• Establish trusted VREs supported by relevant EOSC projects like ENTRUST and OSCARS.

Björn represented the EOSC-funded project EuroScienceGateway and the Galaxy Training Network (GTN) in a Panel discussion of the Unconference session "Open Science Competence Center in the EOSC and beyond" on the second day. During this session, members from EOSC Focus, Skills4EOSC, GARR, OSCARS, EuroScienceGateway, and EVERSE answered questions on the roles and definitions of Competence Centers in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).