This is the glossary for the EOSC Future project with definitions of terms and acronyms. It may be referred by deliverables, milestones and other publications relating to EOSC. Note that definitions related to the FitSM standards family may be found in this separate glossary.
Additions and other changes to this glossary should be coordinated by EOSC Future work package leaders. If you have any questions please contact Matthew Viljoen
| Term or Acronym | Definition |
|---|---|
| Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) | A service (or distributed set of services) which enables users to be identified and to access protected information, other services or functionality. |
| Authentication and Authorisation for Research and Collaboration (AARC) | A series of EC-funded projects which use AAI to bring researcher collaborations closer together. |
| AARC Engagement Group for Infrastructure (AEGIS) | Body which brings together representatives from research and e-infrastructures, operators of AAI services and the AARC team to bridge communication gaps and make the most of common synergies. |
| API | Application Programming Interface |
| Community Catalogue Operator | An organisation operating an EOSC-compliant community catalogue and responsible for the onboarding and validating selected resources from that community catalogue into the EOSC Exchange. |
| Catalogue Operator Representative (COR) | An individual responsible for recording information about a Community Catalogue and onboarding and maintaining that catalogue into the EOSC Exchange. |
| Community Catalogue | A Community catalogue complying with EOSC-Exchange community resource catalogue inclusion criteria and including several resources. It is an external catalogue that can be onboarded into the EOSC Exchange by a Catalogue Operator Representative on behalf of the Community Catalogue Operator. |
| Community Platform | A Community Platform is a platform operated by a community to serve its users. It can be made of multiple services (support services such as AAI, Helpdesk, etc and services for the research) and should contain at least an inventory (e.g. in form of a catalogue) of its assets (services, datasets and other research resources). |
| Data Source | A service that links to collections of research products (see Research Product) as well as services that provide data in response to queries. |
| European Commission (EC) | The executive branch of the European Union |
| European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) | European Open Science Cloud. An envisioned federation of research (data) infrastructures that will create a web of FAIR data and services for science. EOSC will be a key enabler for Open Science and will support researchers in sharing and exploiting research products (e.g as data, publications, and code) through value-added horizontal (i.e. cross-disciplinary) and thematic (i.e. discipline-specific) services. EOSC was developed in an initial implementation phase from 2016-2020 under Horizon 2020 and will be expanded in a second implementation phase via the EOSC Partnership from 2021-2027 under Horizon Europe. |
| EOSC Association | An international non-profit organisation (AISBL) based in Brussels to represent the interest of the EOSC stakeholder community. The association is a partner with the European Commission in the EOSC Partnership and has developed and will continuously update a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) to advise the European Commission on the development and implementation of EOSC. |
| EOSC Interoperability Advisory Board (EIAB) | Responsible for overseeing the EOSC Interoperability Framework; endorses/deprecates guidelines based on the recommendations of the EIAC. A temporary project-based composition has been established during the EOSC Future project, consisting of the Technical Coordination Board. |
| EOSC Interoperability Area Chairs (EIAC) | Responsible for performing the initial assessment of the proposed guidelines; makes recommendations to the EIAB as regards candidates for inclusion in the EOSC Interoperability Framework. A temporary project-based composition has been established during the EOSC Future project, consisting of the task leads of the Architecture and Interoperability work package. |
| EOSC Interoperability Guideline Provider | Responsible for contributing and maintaining Interoperability Guidelines to the EOSC-IF Registry. |
| EOSC Observatory | An interactive dashboard to facilitate the monitoring of (1) EOSC readiness by European Member States and Associated Countries (2) indicators for the EOSC Partnership (3) contributions to the EOSC Partnership and EOSC ecosystem (4) national policies on Open Science and EOSC. The observatory will publicly present results of the monitoring and provide an overview of the implementation of EOSC. |
| EOSC Onboarding Strategy Group | Catalogue Operator Representatives for Community Catalogue from the INFRAEOSC-04-2018 (thematic projects), INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019 (regional projects), and INFRAEOSC-07-2020 (horizontal projects) to ensure implementation/alignment of onboarding of Community catalogues; representatives of the EOSC Portal Onboarding Team (EPOT); operations and maintainer of the EOSC Profiles to ensure implementation according to decisions made within the E-OSG are considered by the EOSC Provider’s Portal developers. Other Provider Representatives interested in onboarding resources to the EOSC Resource Catalogue and EOSC Marketplace. |
| EOSC Marketplace | A web-based interface to search, discover, access, order and use the resources available through the EOSC Exchange, exploiting a range of filtering options, leveraging the relationships available through the Interoperability Framework, and taking advantage of integrations with EOSC Core Services and among other compatible services in the EOSC Exchange. |
| EOSC Partnership | A Co-programmed European Partnership between the EOSC Association and European Commission to implement EOSC under Horizon Europe. The partnership is governed by the tripartite EOSC Partnership Board consisting of representatives from the EOSC Association, EOSC Steering Board, and European Commission. The European Commission will fund €490 million in project and procurement calls in the Work Programmes for EOSC under Horizon Europe. The EOSC Association will collectively via its members contribute in-kind activities to EOSC totalling at least €500 million for the duration of Horizon Europe. |
| EOSC Platform | The EOSC Platform delivers the EOSC Core and EOSC Federation services as an integrated operational environment that enables EOSC research communities to take advantage of this suite of services. Exploiting EOSC Platform capabilities, research communities can add value to their own services in the Exchange and make them more useful and attractive to a wider range of science users. Furthermore, the EOSC Platform, with its extensible architecture, facilitates the addition of new capabilities (Core or Exchange - e.g. horizontal services such as the data transfer) to satisfy emerging user’s requirements. The EOSC Platform currently consists of services such as the comprehensive Resource Catalogues, the Marketplace, the EOSC Infrastructure Proxy for the EOSC Core services, the EOSC AAI Federation, the Helpdesk, the Monitoring, the Accounting, the Order Management, the Execution Framework and the EOSC Interoperability Framework registry. |
| EOSC Portal | Gateway to research-enabling resources including research publications, data, software, and value-added services to support their research. Includes the EOSC Marketplace as well as Knowledge Hub, EOSC Observatory and other resources. |
| EOSC Profile | Metadata schema for the description of services, research products or other research artefacts that their providers choose to share with the EOSC user community through the EOSC Exchange, as well as for describing the organisations offering to provide these resources to EOSC. EOSC Profiles are specified by the EOSC Profile Interoperability Guideline, which defines the entities for which Profiles have been defined and their logical relationships as part of a larger data model. |
| EOSC Service Catalogue | A catalogue containing all the Services onboarded in EOSC, together with their Providers. |
| EOSC Research Product Catalogue | A catalogue containing all the Research Products (datasets, software, etc.) onboarded in EOSC, together with their context in the scholarly communication infrastructure, e.g. creators, organisations, funders, projects. |
| EOSC Resource Catalogue | A catalogue of all EOSC Resources, the result of integrating the EOSC Service Catalogue and the EOSC Research Product Catalogue. |
| EOSC Steering Board | An expert group consisting of representatives of European Member States and Associated Countries that advises the European Commission in the development and implementation of EOSC. The board is also one of the three bodies in the tripartite EOSC Partnership Board that governs the EOSC Partnership. |
| EOSC Core | The components of EOSC that together deliver the essential operations of EOSC, including resource onboarding, discovery, ordering, use, monitoring, accounting and support, including the federated delivery of consistent services across a distributed "system of systems". |
| EOSC Interoperability Guideline | Version-controlled document that describes standards to enable interoperability and explain how Providers can make their resources compatible with them. They outline the high-level protocols (such as REST) and low-level protocols (such as OAI-PMH), data models (e.g. DCAT model), and schemas (e.g. DCAT JSON schema) that need to be implemented or customized to ensure compatibility with each guideline. Guidelines specify the essential technical requirements and configurations that providers should follow in order to make their services compatible with the interoperability guidelines. EOSC Interoperability Guidelines pass a validation process, after which they are onboarded (registered) into the EOSC IF registry. |
| EOSC Core Interoperability Guideline | EOSC Interoperability guideline to enable compatibility with specific EOSC Core services, including EOSC monitoring, EOSC accounting, and EOSC helpdesk. |
| EOSC Exchange | The collection of resources and organisations onboarded to the EOSC Platform, visible in the EOSC Resource Catalogue and EOSC Marketplace, and findable accessible and usable by EOSC Users. |
| EOSC Exchange Interoperability Guideline | EOSC-Exchange Interoperability Guidelines facilitate interoperation of services and resources within thematic areas. As such they are defined, proposed, and maintained by EOSC providers. Specifically, horizontal Interoperability Guidelines facilitate interoperation of services and resources across communities and infrastructures, and can communicate the interoperability capabilities and boundaries of frameworks utilised by communities. |
| EOSC-Interoperability Framework | The collection of EOSC Interoperability Guidelines onboarded to the EOSC Platform, visible in the EOSC IF Registry, which can be used to enable interoperability between individual EOSC Resources and EOSC Core services as well as interoperability between EOSC Resources (e.g. enabling data transfer, orchestration, etc.). The Framework includes the governance processes for reviewing, approving and accepting new Interoperability Guidelines into the IF Registry. |
| EOSC-Interoperability Framework Registry | A database of submitted and approved EOSC Interoperability Guidelines, based on an agreed profile of attributes. |
| EOSC Portal Onboarding Team (EPOT) | Collaborative team which manages and operates the EOSC Onboarding and Audit processes to populate the EOSC-Exchange, using the EOSC Profiles and assessing the compliance of resources with the EOSC Portal inclusion criteria derived from the EOSC Rules of Participation. |
| FAIR | Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Four guiding principles for research data management and stewardship that consist of metadata protocols for making digital research objects (e.g. publications, data, and code) machine-actionable (i.e. the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention). |
| Federation Capability | A functionality that is delivered by a federation for its members (e.g. helpdesk and monitoring in EOSC Future). |
| Federation Interfaces | Technical standards and operating procedures that allow federation members to connect/use a specific federation capability (e.g. the interface defined in the helpdesk interoperability guidelines to connect a community helpdesk to the EOSC helpdesk). |
| Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R) | Federated Identity Management for Research. A collection of research communities working to enable federated identity management for their infrastructures. |
| Horizontal Service | A service that may be used by multiple communities, rather than one that is focussed on one particular community. The following characteristics have been agreed within the EOSC-Future project to define a horizontal service:
|
| Hosting Legal Entity (HLE) | An institution registered as an EOSC resource provider, that is a legal entity and agrees to be accountable for resources onboarded to EOSC. Resources may be onboarded by a resource provider which is not a legal entity, but only if the Hosting Legal Entity field includes one legal entity already registered as resource provider, if this has been agreed in advance with them |
| Inclusion Criteria | A set of defined requirements with which providers, catalogue operators and resources need to comply in order to be onboarded into EOSC |
| Infrastructure and value-added services | Generic capabilities that users/customers or thematic services can use to perform/ease compute and data intensive steps. Example services within this group: IaaS clouds; HTC clusters; Container execution sites; Orchestrators; Schedulers; File transfer; Data replication |
| Indicators of Compromise (IoC) | A piece of digital forensics which indicates a potential breach of a host system or network |
| Lead provider | Resource Organisation (Resource profile/ERP.BAI.3) that manages or delivers the resource, or that coordinates the Resource delivery in a federated scenario. |
| Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) | Non-proprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication |
| Persistent Identifier (PID) | Long-lasting reference to a document, file, web page, or other object |
| Provider | An organisation operating a resource, whether operating a service or providing access to research artefacts for use or access by users not affiliated with the organisation itself. |
| REsearch and Education Identity FEDerationS (REFEDS) | A group which articulates the mutual needs of research and education identity federations worldwide. |
| Research Product | A scientific or research output (classified as publication (literature), research data, research software, and "other kinds of products"), accessible or linked from an EOSC Data Source (e.g. repository, scientific database, publisher archive aggregator, CRIS system), whose metadata might be "harvested from" the linking EOSC Data Source using a defined protocol (e.g. OAI-PMH). |
| Resource | Services, catalogues, research products, training resources, interoperability guidelines and other assets. In the context of EOSC, these are understand to be both digital and produced or operated by or of potential use to scientists and researchers. Services include data sources, computational resources and data storage resources. |
| Rules of Participation (RoP) | The standards and conduct required of EOSC participants. EOSC participants agree to adhere to the RoP. |
| SCI | Security for Collaboration among Infrastructure. A collaborative activity of security representatives from large-scale distributed academic computing infrastructures managing cross-infrastructure operational security risks and building trust and developing policy standards |
| Security Incident Response Trust framework for Federated Identity (SIRTFI) | REFEDS working group which enables the coordination of incident response across federated organisations. |
| Software Quality Assurance (SQA) | A process which works in parallel with software development to ensure that the software meets the required quality. |
| SQA as a Service (SQAaaS) | The provision of services which provide SQA. |
| Technical Coordination Board (TCB) | Technical Coordination Board of the EOSC-Future project. Entity which oversees the technical direction of the project, represents technical stakeholders and ensures technical alignment with other initiatives. |
| Thematic services | Scientific services (incl. data) that provide discipline-specific capabilities for researchers. (e.g. browsing and download data and apps, workflow development, execution, online analytics, result visualisation, sharing of result data, publications, applications) |
| Training resource | Any resource – including print and non-print materials and online/open-access resources – which supports and enhances, directly or indirectly, learning and teaching. If a training resource is used in a training environment, for training activities that are part of a training plan and involve instructors, facilitators and students, then we speak of training materials. |
| Technology Readiness Level (TRL) | An indication of the maturity of a service. Within EOSC-Future the three most relevant levels are: TRL 7 (Beta). EC definition: "System prototype demonstration in operational environment". EOSC-Future assessment criteria: |
| Wise Information Security for E-infrastructures (WISE) | Community which enhances best practice in information security for IT infrastructures for research. |
| WP | Work package |