BlueBRIDGE has fully achieved its objectives by providing 66 operational VREs, serving 3000+ users. These VREs span 120+ different organizations across 32 countries, application domains and purposes. In many cases, their potential impact in the areas addressed is huge. The implementation and deployment of these VREs has required the empowering of the D4Science infrastructure both in terms of functionality and capacity. In particular, during the project the infrastructure was enriched with powerful services for the management of federated resources (e.g. Information System, Accounting and Authorization, Data Transfer). It was also equipped with flexible solutions for the integration of external computing (e.g. EGI, GARR) and data (e.g. Copernicus CMEMS, OpenAIRE) infrastructures implementing standards solutions when possible. These facilities are used by VRE implementations for processing data through a large, yet extensible, set of approaches including statistical, data mining, quantitative analysis, and machine learning methods. Algorithms from multiple languages (R Scripts, Java, Python, C/C++ and KNIME workflow Projects) can be imported, easily modified and executed either as a private process or as a collaborative process by sharing it with selected VREs colleagues. Provenance is automatically generated by the data analytics framework seamlessly and transparently enabling re-use, re-purpose, repeatability and sharing of any algorithm execution. A comprehensive BlueBRIDGE resource catalogue (
https://bluebridge.d4science.org/catalogue(opens in new window)) providing access to Datasets, Research Objects, Services, and Virtual Research Environments, has also been developed and it is now fully operational.
The complete list of VREs developed and operated in the project is available through the BlueBRIDGE Catalogue (
https://bluebridge.d4science.org/catalogue(opens in new window)). These comprise (i) VREs facilitating stock assessment processes and activities dedicated to manage and publish the results of these processes; (ii) VREs offering aquafarming assessment tools to evaluate and optimize aquafarms performance in terms of a number of Key Performance Indicators and to perform benchmarking analysis against best practices as well as a techno-economic investment analysis; (iii) VREs supporting spatial planning, both for marine protected areas and for aquaculture sites analysis and management; and (iv) VREs supporting education by providing infrastructures enabled environments for hands-on training.
The BlueBRIDGE project has also built a consolidated community of over 2700 relevant contacts. At the end of March 2018 Twitter counts 790 followers, LinkedIn over 1466 connections, Facebook 206 Likes, YouTube over 3000 views and SlideShare over 18000 views. It has organised 8 main workshops during its project lifetime, engaging with over 250 managers, policy-makers and scientists from the fisheries, biodiversity and e-infrastructures domains globally.
BlueBRIDGE made an important step in engaging private companies by becoming the first H2020 project to run an open call for SMEs in an effort to reduce the gaps between private companies and data e-infrastructures. This initiative has succeeded in building a bridge between the Blue Growth sector and Data e-infrastructures. With a total amount of around 400 content pieces produced during the project lifetime, the BlueBRIDGE website (www.bluebridge-vres.eu) has become the reference point for data practitioners in the Blue Growth area willing to approach the e-infrastructure world.
