Launch of the Initial ESCAPE ESFRI Science Analysis Platform with discovery & data staging

ESCAPE has launched the initial prototype of the ESCAPE ESAP (ESFRI Science Analysis Platform), allowing, for the moment, data discovery and data staging of data catalogues that are now available on ESCAPE ESAP. (Note: This version is not yet ready for public release)

The ESCAPE ESAP is a flexible science platform-service gateway tailored to the requirements and the users’ needs of each of the ESFRIs and the capability to access and combine open access data from multiple collections of research infrastructures and from the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It also stages this data for subsequent processing and analysis, allowing data discovery and handling of large and distributed data collections, thanks to a widerange of software tools and packages developed by and in support of the ESFRIs. The ESFRIs can define their own data catalogue query schema, which is then translated by the ESAP Application Programming Interface (API) Gateway to a Graphical User Interface (GUI) where users can specify query parameters for a specific data catalogue.

The current version of the ESAP supports virtual observatory (VO)-enabled data catalogues using existing VO protocols, but also supports non-VO-enabled data catalogues. The integration of non- VO-enabled catalogues demonstrates the soundness of the ESAP architectural design, and how easy it is to integrate a data catalogue into the platform. For the moment, the data catalogues integrated in the prototype are: Virtual Observatory, Zooniverse (the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research, also used by ESCAPE in its Citizen Science projects), Apertif, LOFAR (also an ESCAPE Citizen Science project) and ASTRON VO.

The ESCAPE ESAP user interface links are directly connected with the RUCIO Data Management System User Interface to support data staging. RUCIO serves the data needs of modern scientific experiments, with large amounts of data, countless numbers of files, heterogeneous storage systems, worldwide distributed data centers, monitoring and analytics This technology is also being used by ESCAPE DIOS (Data Infrastructure for Open Science), a federated data infrastructure of open access data that enables large national research data centers to work together and build a robust cloud-like service to curate and scale up to multi-Exabyte needs.

(Note: This version is not yet ready for public release)

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ESCAPE ESAP! CHECK THE POSTER PRESENTED DURING ADASS 2020