EOSC-Life built on several highly relevant EC-funded initiatives, such as the H2020-funded projects BioMedBridges and CORBEL, which provided the foundation for a quick-start of the consortium.
The 13 European Life Science Research Infrastructures that first joined forces in these forerunner projects continued to offer combined services through the EOSC-Life project, contributing a lasting legacy in the form of tools, workflows, and data resources for the benefit of diverse stakeholders in society.
To understand more fully what EOSC-Life achieved, it is useful to reflect on these foundation projects:
The EC-funded BioMedBridges project was led by the ESFRI infrastructures ELIXIR, BBMRI-ERIC, EATRIS, ECRIN, Infrafrontier, and Instruct-ERIC. The project ensured that interoperable standards were available across all data resources and services shared by two of more of the ESFRI infrastructures. These standards were then implemented to enable data interoperation between ESFRI projects in the biomedical sciences.
In the EC-funded CORBEL project, the 13 BMS RIs translated biomedical discoveries into new, innovative, and cost-effective treatments by effectively joining their scientific capabilities and shared services.
EOSC-Life was designed to fit within the overall landscape of EOSC projects.
The BMS RIs are partners in the following related projects:
EOSCPilot led work on data interoperability and the EDMI model, science demonstrators, and principles of engagement and contributed to policy work-packages.
EOSC-hub enabled the ELIXIR Competence Centre to deploy a reference data set distribution service that mirrored key data resources in a distributed cloud environment and complemented the effort to publish FAIR RI resources in this project.
FREYA worked to improve discovery, navigation, retrieval, and access of research data resources, enabling the identification persistent identifiers – a key component of FAIR.
XDC was a project carried out to support the federation of medical storage resources based on the INDIGO-DataCloud and OpenAIRE to ascertain the compatibility of registries and catalogues.
RDA (Research Data Alliance) enables social and technical bridges to be rapidly built in order to encourage open data sharing and re-use on a global level. Experts in EOSC-Life WP6 led several RDA working groups related to research data management, interoperability, and FAIR principles. Thus, the RDA informed and was informed by EOSC-Life work on FAIRifying RI data resources (WP1) and FAIR tools and metrics (WP6).
AARC2 allows the BMS RIs to design an AAI framework to develop interoperable AAI, which enable researchers to access the whole research and infrastructure service portfolio with one login.
The ELIXIR AAI and work planned on AAI and user access, including a planned sourcing of eInfrastructure services, were planned to build on the foundation laid in the ELIXIR-EXCELERATE (2015-2019) and AARC2 (2017-2019) projects and to operate the joint Life Science AAI and component e-Infrastructure services provided by GEANT, EGI, and EUDAT.
E-Rare allows the BMS RIs to jointly engage with JPI, ERA-NETs, and similar initiatives to ensure that users can easily gain visibility of and access BMS RIs’ services. For example, the E-Rare homepage describes service and access pathways.