Tuesday, September 14, 2010

EGI Technical Forum 2010




A few of us are in Amsterdam this week attending the EGI Technical Forum. The rather interesting programme really got underway after lunch today so, since there are three of us over here, we spread ourselves out around the many parallel meetings.

Mike attended the "Virtual Research Communities" session (apparently these replace what we currently call "Virtual Organisations") and discovered a wealth of acronyms that he'd never heard of before; DARIAH, NEXPReS, EnviroGRIDS, e-NMR etc. In all there were seven potential VRC's represented, each of which had a ten minute slot in which to provide a summary of their research field and outline their requirements.

It turns out these seemingly disparate communities have broadly similar needs (authentication, authorization, data management etc) and don't necessarily have (or want to become) computing science experts. Who would've thought it.

You know, what we need is some sort of Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe. Oh.