About gCube

gCube is the Software System designed and implemented to enable the building and operation of a Service Oriented Infrastructure supporting the definition of Virtual Research Environments (VREs). It is equipped with a rich array of "mediators" making it possible the exploitation of services, repositories, and facilities offered by others data and computing infrastructures.

A Service Oriented Infrastructures is an infrastructure developed according to the Service Orientation principles, this reflects in facilities for the re-usability and dynamic allocation of the resources forming the infrastructure itself. A Virtual Research Environment is the materialization of a very flexible and agile application development model based on the notion of Software as a Service (SaaS) in which components may be bound instantly, just at the time they are needed and then the binding may be discarded. According to it, user communities are enabled to define their own applications by simply selecting the application constituents (the services, the collections, the machines) among the pool of resources made available through the infrastructure. The cost of operating each defined VRE is completely outsourced to the infrastructure that by applying economies of scale to the operation of the applications (sharing and re-use) can offer better, cheaper and more reliable applications than single communities can themselves.

This system has been implemented with the support of the European Commission in the context of a series of projects:

• the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development
  • DILIGENT (grant no. 004260) - A Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technology
• the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration
  • D4Science (grant no. 212488) - DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology for Science;
  • D4Science-II (grant no.239019) - DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology for Science – Phase II;
  • ENVRI (grant no. 283465) - Common Operations of Environmental Research Infrastructures;
  • iMarine (grant no. 283644) - Data e-Infrastructure Initiative for Fisheries Management and Conservation of Marine Living Resources;
  • EUBrazilOpenBio (grant no. 288754) - EU-Brazil Open Data and Cloud Computing e-Infrastructure for Biodiversity.
• the H2020 research and innovation programme
  • SoBigData (grant no. 654024) - SoBigData Research Infrastructure;
  • PARTHENOS (grant no. 654119) - Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies;
  • EGI-Engage (grant no. 654142) - Engaging the EGI Community towards an Open Science Commons;
  • ENVRI PLUS (grant no. 654182) - Environmental Research Infrastructures Providing Shared Solutions for Science and Society;
  • BlueBRIDGE (grant no. 675680) - Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth;
  • PerformFISH (grant no. 727610) - Consumer-driven Production: Integrating Innovative Approaches for Competitive and Sustainable Performance across the Mediterranean Aquaculture Value Chain;
  • AGINFRA PLUS (grant no. 731001) - Accelerating user-driven e-infrastructure innovation in Food Agriculture;
  • DESIRA (grant no. 818194) - Digitisation: Economic and Social Impacts in Rural Areas;
  • ARIADNEplus (grant no. 823914) - Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Data Networking in Europe – plus;
  • RISIS 2 (grant no. 824091) - European Research Infrastructure for Science, technology and Innovation policy Studies 2;
  • EOSC-Pillar (grant no. 857650);
  • Blue Cloud (grant no. 862409) - Piloting innovative services for Marine Research & the Blue Economy;
  • SoBigData-PlusPlus (grant no. 871042) - SoBigData Research Infrastructure;
  • MOVING (grant no. 862739) - Mountain Valorization through Interconnectedness and Green Growth

Some details on the specific developments are reported here.

The rest of this Wiki is dedicated to providing pointers to various information on this system including:

• distinguishing features devised to provide the reader with a feature-based characterisation of the system offerings;
• documentation and guides specifically developed to serve the needs of three key players, i.e. end-users, system administrators and application developers.