WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 226

partners, was looking for and supporting external user communities who could
bene t from the SCI-BUS technology. The main target of this service was large

communities, particularly in or associated with other funded European projects.
However, SCI-BUS also supported several local activities (for example,
teaching and learning gateways) that have the potential to be disseminated to
wider communities.

This section concentrates on this third category. Three representative examples
of large European projects, agINFRA, VERCE, and DRIHM, that use SCI-BUS
technology as the result of intensive support and collaboration with those projects
are described below. However, several other projects and communities have also
successfully built, or are in the process of building, WS-PGRADE/gUSE based
gateways. A summary table of these external community gateways directly sup-
ported by the SCI-BUS project is provided in Table 17.1 . Some of the gateways are
mentioned or described in various levels of detail in other parts of this topic as
examples or illustration of the utilization and different features of WS-PGRADE/
gUSE. Please, note that the majority of these gateways are still under development
at the time of writing this topic with more or less advanced prototypes or beta
releases that are being operated.

17.2 The agINFRA Science Gateway for Workflows

The main objective of the agINFRA project (Pesce 2013) in the EU 7th Framework
Programme is to elaborate and provide an advanced, open, and sustainable data
infrastructure with services and tools for agricultural research and information
management communities. In the project, the studies on stakeholder needs show
clearly that agricultural research communities are located in a wide, multidisci-
plinary array of research domains, ranging from molecular genetics to geo-sciences,
including also social and economic sciences. Since the scope of the project might be
considered relatively wide, the presented work focuses on two important stake-
holders groups:

ICT and information managers of shared domain- and subject-based repositories
including service providers (e.g., aggregators), and

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developers and providers of IT applications for research and related tasks who
may be interested in customizing or developing further agINFRA components
and tools.

￿

The current agINFRA infrastructure relies not only on cloud and grid resources
but various geographically distributed data sources; registries, pre-existing and new
data management, processing, and visualization components are also involved in
the infrastructure. Complex workflows have been identi ed at four levels according

to the granularity of individual tasks; starting from the “ Workflows of Researchers ”
including their everyday research and publication activities (Level 1), and ending