The ESCAPE services aim to solve data management and data re-use challenges to foster open science and scientific innovation. In particular, the ESCAPE ESFRI Science Analysis Platform (ESAP),  the Data Infrastructure for Open Science (DIOS) and the Citizen Science projects have made interesting progress toward this objective. Below, we have highlighted the most important results and impact achieved by these three services.

 

The ESFRI Science Analysis Platform (ESAP)

The ESCAPE ESAP is the key interface between the services delivered by ESCAPE and the wider scientific community.  
The ESAP will help the users to discover, engage and interact with the data products, software tools, workflows, and services that will be made available through the project by providing:

  • Data discovery and retrieval from a range of archives and data repositories;
  • Exploration and discovery of relevant tools within the ESCAPE software repository;
  • Access to a range of compute and analysis services provided both by project partners and by other facilities;
  • Orchestration of data, services, and software to help users create and access research environments that meet their particular needs. 

The ESAP is still very much under development at time of writing, and its range of capabilities continues to expand. Some highlights of current capabilities include:

  • Access to a variety of archives, including Apertif and Zooniverse;
  • Powerful tools for searching the Virtual Observatory through IVOA-compliant interfaces, and for integrating with VO tools through SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol;
  • The capability to search and discover data in the Rucio-based ESCAPE data lake;
  • The ability to locate software in the ESCAPE project software repository, and to stage that software to BinderHub-based interactive data analysis services;
  • Bi-directional data transfer between the ESAP “shopping basket” and Python-based analysis services;
  • Integration with the ESCAPE project’s Identity & Access Management system.

Thanks to the ESFRI Science Analysis Platform (ESAP) the data previously hidden behind proprietary, hard to use, and non-interoperable interfaces, is now exposed through public interfaces and integrated with available processing services to foster open science.
Future activities focus on the completion of the ongoing upgrade of the ESAP core architecture that will provide additional stability and scalability and new asynchronous service integration capabilities. A deeper integration with the other ESCAPE services will be achieved to provide data lake integration at a variety of deployment locations (ESCAPE DIOS) and more advanced searching and selecting of software and workflows within the repository (ESCAPE OSSR).
All of this work, will finally lead to the integration of the ESAP and its ecosystem within the European Open Science Cloud.

 

The ESCAPE Data Infrastructure for Open Science (DIOS)

The ESCAPE DIOS is a federated data infrastructure of open access data that follows the FAIR data management principles and enables large national research data centres to work together and build a flexible data lake in terms of data storage, security, safety and transfer to curate and scale up to their multi-exabyte data needs.
Recently, the ESCAPE DIOS team was able to prove that the usability and sustainability of the pilot data lake infrastructure could meet the ESFRIs requirements, such as FAIR, KM3Net, CTA, SKAO and LSST. In fact, several experiments deployed and used private installations of the data lake data management and file transfer tools.
A notebook extension was also developed to allow users to browse and download data in the data lake, enabling the use of big data for researchers and the wider scientific community.
The next step will be to have the data lake model and tools evolving and being adopted beyond particle physics covering different use cases and needs to provide a data management and access facilitating-service in the European Open Science Cloud. To achieve this, future planned activities are:

  • Addressing new challenges and ideas proposed by the ESFRI, given the manifested interest from ESFRI to keep the DIOS after ESCAPE, perceived as an ideal place to exercise and test tools and models;
  • Expanding the EOSC portal Open Science capabilities intensifying activities and discussions for collaborations between the ESCAPE DIOS infrastructure and external EC funded project, such as CS3MESH4EOSC/ScienceMesh.

 

ESCAPE Citizen Science projects

The ESCAPE Citizen Science (CS) is an astronomy and astroparticle physics programme that engages the society at large to foster innovation in science and technology, contribute to real scientific discoveries and support the implementation of EOSC by training and educating the scientific community in the usage and implementation of the ESCAPE services and ESFRI facilities.
Currently there are three citizen science projects Clump Scout, LOFAR and SuperWASP - Black Hole Hunters, with more in development, that have contributed to increase the engagement of the research community and increase the science literacy of society at large, with 26 thousand volunteers providing an astounding total of 3.4 million classifications to date.
The ESCAPE Citizen Science and ESAP team worked together to further foster open science by allowing the scientific community to download and analyse the Zooniverse data on the ESCAPE ESAP.
The next step for the ESCAPE citizen science team is to expand its connection with the ESCAPE ESAP activities, to allow the management of a Zooniverse project throughout its entire lifespan. 

 

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