UbuntuNet-Connect 2015 Conference Papers and Presentations

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Experts’ Assignment Algorithm for Cloudbased Agro-advisory Service Information System (CASIS) using Weighted Sum Model: Piloting CASIS
(2015-11) Fue, Kadeghe; Tumbo, Siza D.; Sanga, Camilius
A Cloud-based Agro-advisory Service Information System (CASIS) uses interactive operating mode where assignment of questions from farmers to experts is done manually. Questions as input to the system are received randomly in a day and experts are supposed to respond within a specified time. The system has 20 experts in its database who respond to farmers questions and it can receive more than 30 questions per day. If there is a significant delay in the responses to a question then the question is reassigned to another expert. Each expert behaves differently when responding to their assigned questions. In order to address the shortcomings, the experts’ assignment algorithm was developed utilizing the respondents’ response probabilities and time of responses. Assignment decision is based on using a model that trains ‘CASIS’ on the determination of best experts. CASIS training algorithm is developed to complement current weakness. The algorithm doesn’t omit experts who respond late but complements them with active ones. The decision boundary is homogeneity and numerical so as to give a single output quickly. The input (x1, x2) and output (y) variables are numeric. The main concept is that the output is generated using linear combination or weighted sum model The algorithm considers response time as best criteria to satisfy the farmers who send the questions. This algorithm provides a great chance of finding a quick answer within a short period of time. Automatic expert assignment is essential to achieve high adoption of the system that satisfies the on-time farmer advisories demand and promote efficiency as well as effective extension services for rural development.
Support to Emerging NRENs
(2015-11) Stöver, Cathrin
How to Quadruple the Reach and Value of Your NREN
(2015-11)
Australia and Africa have much in common – vast distances, sparse population, heat, rain and of course the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). AARNet Pty Ltd (AARNet) is the Australian Research and Education Network in Australia (NREN). The building of long term and sustainable physical infrastructure has been one of the key strategies in building AARNet into what it is today; one of the worlds most advanced NRENs. Some 12 years ago, and almost by accident, AARNet became involved in major civil works projects simply because it could not procure dark fibre or services at a reasonable cost. Australia is either world’s largest island or the world’s smallest continent and this presentation will detail the journey in building more than 30,000 pair kilometres of dark fibre infrastructure, connecting every University, many schools, hospitals and research centres, across some 7 million square kms of the “wide brown land”. Today the network stretches from the northern tip of Australia, transiting some of the most inhospitable terrain to Western Australia, now the home of the Australian SKA. It has become vital underpinning infrastructure for sensor networks in the Great Barrier Reef and building it has been a fascinating challenge. Infrastructure begets infrastructure. Having built the initial fibre tails to its major customers, AARNet had currency. It had right and title to its own assets and was able to swap fibre pairs with councils, energy companies and other telecommunications carriers doubling that asset. It swapped many times over doubling the fibre footprint. It built a reputation for being a small and dynamic civil works group and soon was asked to partner with other carriers looking to build into remote and regional areas. AARNet simply built one side of a fibre ring and the partner built the other. AARNet proved to be a non-competitive partner simply looking for a lifetime interest in dark fibre. Today AARNet has more than quadrupled its fibre footprint courtesy of simply having taken the initial step to build fibre tails into the backbone network. Above the network products and services are now very important to AARNet but we recognise that we will do nothing without the ‘network’. This presentation will explore what worked and what didn’t; a virtual cookbook for building an NREN looking for a long term and economic competitive edge. Examples will be given for how to create a “dial before you dig system”, how to contract with civil works partners, how to partner with other infrastructure owners such as energy companies where there are specific requirements relating to regulated income, and how to deal with incumbent and dominant telecommunications carriers. Finally and most importantly the presentation will outline how message to government and relevant national and international funding bodies the return on investment in an NREN with long term sustainable research infrastructure.
Building a Cyber Security Emergency Response Team (CERT) for the NREN Community – The Case of KENET CERT
(2015-11) Muia, Peter; Kashorda, Meoli; Aseda, Kennedy; Osure, Ronald; Njau, Martin
Kenya through the regulator, Communications Authority (CA) has setup a national Cyber Security Emergency Response Team (KE-CIRT). This national CERT in Kenya has several sector CERTs with the Kenya Education Network (KENET) having the mandate of setting up and running the education sector CERT in Kenya (Communications Authority of Kenya, 2015). The purpose of the KENET CERT is to identify threats in the Internet and communicate the same to its community (Kenya Education Network CERT, 2015). It also identifies threats within the community and communicates the same to the rest of the Internet community. Additionally, it provides a mechanism where security incidents can be reported and resolved within the KENET community. Experiences are shared with the community and documented for future reference. The CERT is also responsible for making sure that KENET systems and network are safe from security threats. KENET setup the KENET CERT that is run and operated at KENET by the KENET team. This paper and conference session describes the setup of the KENET CERT, the model of operation and the impact and experiences learned from running an NREN CERT in Kenya.
The Making of MoRENet
(2015-11) Janz, Robert; Chemane, Lourino
Although MoRENet has been defined in 2002 and included in the National ICT Policy Implementation Strategy of Mozambique as one of the priority projects in the area of education, only in in 2005 the pilot phase of this network started covering some institutions in Maputo , and it took until 2014 before MoRENet started to provide national services. The reasons for this long gestation period and how they were dealt with can be lessons for other emerging National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). The discussion of MoRENet initiative started during the formulation of the ICT Policy Implementation Strategy in 2001, and it has been defined as a project with the aim of providing affordable Internet services for the Higher Education and Research sector in Mozambique. The first attempt to build a national network for research and higher education and implement the envisaged services in Mozambique did not take off for various reasons, the most important being that the initiative was not well embedded within the stakeholders and also because there was no sound financial plan. NRENs are often presented as a technical solution to provide affordable Internet services, with the higher education and research sector as sole beneficiary. It is wiser to address society priorities related to the Networked Readiness of the country when trying to prove the case of the NREN. In 2011 the MoRENet initiative got back to the momentum it had in 2005, this time as a joint project of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education and Culture. At the end of 2012 a financial plan was presented that forecast that, with initial funding from the World Bank, through the Mozambique eGovernment and Communication Infrastructure Project (MEGCIP), MoRENet would be financial sustainable in 2016. Since 2014 MoRENet is providing services and in 2015 has reached national coverage.
Data Repositories and Science Gateways for Open Science
(2015-11) Barbera, Roberto
The steep decrease of costs of large/huge-bandwidth Wide Area Networks has fostered in the recent years the spread and the uptake of the Grid Computing paradigm and the distributed computing ecosystem has become even more complex with the recent emergence of Cloud Computing. All these developments have triggered the new concept of e-Infrastructures which are being built since several years both in Europe and the rest of the world to support diverse multi-/inter-disciplinary Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) and their Virtual Research Environments (VREs). E-Infrastructure components can indeed be key platforms to support the Scientific Method, the “knowledge path” followed every day by scientists since Galileo Galilei. Distributed Computing and Storage Infrastructures (local High Performance/Throughput Computing resources, Grids, Clouds, long term data preservation services) are ideal both for the creation of new datasets and the analysis of existing ones while Data Infrastructures (including Open Access Document Repositories – OADRs – and Data Repositories – DRs) are essential also to evaluate existing data and annotate them with results of the analysis of new data produced by experiments and/or simulations. Last but not least, Semantic Web based enrichment of data is key to correlate document and data, allowing scientists to discover new knowledge in an easy way. However, although big efforts are being done in the last years, both at technological and political level, Open Access and Open Education are still far from being pervasive and ubiquitous and prevent Open Science to be fully established. One of the main drawbacks of this situation is the limiting effect it has on the reproducibility and extensibility of science outputs which are, since more than four centuries, two fundamental pillars of the Scientific Method. In this contribution we present the Open Access Repository (OAR), a pilot data preservation repository of INFN and other Italian Research Organisations' products (publications, software, data, etc.) meant to serve both researchers and citizen scientists and to be interoperable with other related initiatives both in Italy and abroad. OAR is powered by the INVENIO software and is both an Open Access Initiative conforming and an official OpenDOAR data provider, able to automatically harvest resources from different sources, including the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), using RESTful API’s. It is also one of the official OpenAIRE archives, compliant with version 3.0 of its guidelines. OAR allows SAML-based federated authentication and it is one of the Service Providers of the eduGAIN inter-federation; it is also connected to DataCite for the issuance and registration of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). But what makes OAR really different from other repositories is its capability to connect to Science Gateways and exploit Distributed Computing and Storage Infrastructures worldwide, including EGI and EUDAT ones, to easily reproduce and extend scientific analyses. In this presentation some concrete examples related to the data of the ALEPH and ALICE Experiments will be shown and the way the above Open Science approach is being replicated for Africa within the Sci-GaIA project will be presented.
Managing Science and Technology: The Mozambican Ecosystem
(2015-11) Muhlanga, Marangaze Munhepe; Lima, Solange Rito; Massingue, Venâncio; Ferriera, João Nuno
The Current Research Information System (CRIS) emerges as an embracing paradigm for managing the multitude of Science and Technology (S&T) components and players. Instantiating its concepts and directives in the S&T ecosystems of developing countries allows to save years of progress, bringing these countries directly to the European level regarding S&T management. In this context, this article aims at discussing the challenges and strategies for the implementation of technological platforms for managing S&T, taking Mozambique and its NREN as the primary goal. By identifying and understanding the components of the Mozambican S&T ecosystem, we expect to foster science in developing countries and promote international cooperation.
Learning from Somalia and Ethiopia – the NREN as a Tool for Building National Expertise: A Co-Authorship Between SomaliREN and the World Bank
(2015-11) Firestone, Rachel
Countries in the process of developing their ICT ecosystem often face the challenge of end users lacking the skills and information necessary for using the new technological service to its full capacity. States recovering from conflict and emerging out of long periods of isolation tend to experience this imbalance in infrastructure and soft-skill development even more poignantly as they work to expand many services and sectors concurrently. Somalia is a good example of this as its national technical capacity is too nascent to deploy national Research and Education (NREN) infrastructure without importing external expertise. Yet past development experience in-country also demonstrates that reliance on outside expertise can underemphasize local knowledge development and result in institution ill prepared to avail of the technology at their disposal at development project completion. This paper takes a comparative analysis of NREN and education-based technology project experiences in Somalia and Ethiopia aims to explore how an NREN can not only avoid this pitfall, but how the unique services it can provide in addition to connectivity can act as a tool to building out the technical skillsets necessary to support a vibrant ICT sector and competitive developments in the STEM professions across the board.
How Tech Hubs are Helping to Drive Economic Growth in Africa: Background Report for World Bank: World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends
(2015-11) Kelly, Tim; Firestone, Rachel
Digital technologies have spread rapidly. Digital dividends—the broader development benefits from using these technologies—have not. Digital technologies to benefit everyone everywhere requires improving the “analog” complements to digital investments—by strengthening regulations that ensure competition among businesses, by adapting workers’ skills to the demands of the new economy, and by ensuring that institutions are accountable. Inclusion, efficiency, innovation are the main mechanisms for the Internet to promote development. How can these mechanisms be leveraged to promote Africa’s development? The paper tracks some 117 Tech Hubs across Africa, many of which have been created in the last few years. The paper looks at the patterns of origin by which Tech Hubs are created, why they have a high failure rate, and what makes for success.
Virtual Research Environment for Value-Added Services in National and Regional NRENs: Case Studies
(2015-11) Prnjat, Ognjen; Liabotis, Ioannis; Kanellopoulos, Christos
Case studies are presented for the role of national and regional NRENs beyond connectivity, encompassing computing (grid, cloud and High-Performance computing) services and big data management services. The case studies are the recently started VI-SEEM and MAGIC projects. The VI-SEEM project, started in October 2015, unifies the existing e-Infrastructures in South-East Europe (SEE) and the Eastern Mediterranean (EM), including Grid, cloud, and High-Performance Computing resources. It does so in order to better utilise synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to be provided to the scientific user communities in this large region. The overall objective is to provide a user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for scientific communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEE and EM regions; by linking networking, computing, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, software and tools. The Virtual Research Environment provides the scientists and researchers with the support in the full lifecycle of scientific research: accessing relevant data necessary for their research, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing and integrating new knowledge and data - which is stored and shared within the same VRE. The project is founded on the serviceoriented data-driven approach, where a specific set of activities deals not just with simple eInfrastructure data storage (live, dropbox-like), but includes the support for the full data lifecycle for the 3 target communities. The value-added computing services provided to the researchers include grid and cloud computing, as well as large-scale High-Performance Computing platforms, with a set of management tools provided for the unified management of computing resources. All project services will be provided through a service catalogue. Similarly the MAGIC project, started in May 2015, aims to adopt a service-oriented approach to advertising specifically the NREN cloud services, and this approach will be implemented through a compatible service catalogue, based on the GEANT cloud catalogue: thus the envisaged MAGIC cloud catalogue is also briefly discussed.
MAGIC: A Collaboration Project to Globally Connect Researchers and Academics
(2015-11) De Oliveira Guimarães, Leandro Marcos; López, María José
Building on the success of the ELCIRA project, RedCLARA - with partners from Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Central Asia and Asia-Pacific is leading MAGIC (Middleware for collaborative Applications and Global vIrtual Communities), a cooperation project that aims to significantly improve the ability of researchers and academics around the world to collaborate together. MAGIC might be the first really global collaborative project in the REN environment. But which are the benefits of the project to its partner institutions’ (UbuntuNet and WACREN) members? How can the African researchers and academics benefit from MAGIC? By fostering and easing collaboration and mobility, MAGIC is fostering intra-regional and global collaboration, helping to reduce the technological gap, and as a consequence, in the long term, to reduce the brain drain.
Structuring and Implementing the Brazilian Academic Cloud: Strategy, Modelling, Challenges and Services
(2015-11) Ribeiro Filho, José Luiz; Nunes, Antônio Carlos Fernandes; Nobuyoshi Dos Santos Makino, Ricardo; Barreto Araújo, Gorgonio; Machado Leopoldino Martins, Graciela; De Oliveira Guimarães, Leandro Marcos
This paper presents an overview of the strategies currently adopted by some National Research and Education Networks (NREN) to implement and offer scientific cloud computing services. It describes the constraints, opportunities and the strategy chosen by the Brazilian NREN – Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP) to plan, deploy and operate cloud services to and in collaboration with Brazilian public universities and research institutes. The hybrid, community and federated strategy was chosen as the most flexible and suitable for the current Brazilian NREN operation and funding models. It describes the cloud services that are in production or in a pilot phase, their status and next steps planned. Cloud service planning, deployment and operation are discussed, the alternatives considered and the chosen options. At the end, the cloud services deployed by RNP are presented and discussed, considering the technologies and benefits to the academic community in Brazil.
Building Institutional Repositories in Sudan: Keys to Success
(2015-11) Abdelrahman, Iman Abuel Maaly
An Institutional Repository (IR) is a set of services that a university offers to its community members for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by its researchers and staff members. IR establishment is a challenge for information professionals because the main goal for implementing IRs is to provide Open Access (OA) to institution research output. The growth of open access institutional repositories has been very remarkable in the developed countries. However, in most of the developing countries like Sudan awareness of the concept of open access and IR is very low. Since its foundation, the Sudanese Research and Education Network (SudREN) has successfully implemented several library projects. The most successful one was a project funded by UNESCO in 2013. The main objective of that project was to implement Library Management Systems (LMS) and Institutional Repositories (IR) for three Sudanese universities based on open source Software Systems. Project components were technical and operational training, software customization, and hardware preparations. The main role played by SudREN was providing administrative and financial services through the Steering Committee that acted as an advisory body for the project during its lifetime. In addition to that, SudREN provided technical support to the project team. This paper describes the capacity requirements for SudREN to support the provision and use of value-added services to its member institutions focusing on the IR project. It describes the key success factors in implementing IRs in the Sudanese universities. It also discusses the opportunities and challenges facing the project to reach its ultimate goal. This paper gives examples of successful collaboration in practice between the three key groups of professionals – librarians, IT/information systems professionals, and engineers – whose collaboration have done much to the success of the project. The paper provides lessons learned and concludes ways of overcoming obstacles and achieving productive mutual understanding among SudREN’s stakeholders and with other players.
Useful Flexibilities for African Regional Research and Education Networks
(2015-11) Martin, Duncan H.
The UbuntuNet Alliance is conceived of as an association of NRENs in a given region. The hierarchy Institutions → NRENs → Regional RENs characterises what may be called “the standard REN model”. Regional RENs provide transit to their member NRENs and interconnect with each other over interregional distances. The standard REN model expects no more of any Regional REN. The standard REN model evolved principally in Europe. In the writer’s view, the circumstances of African countries are too widely disparate for continued as-is adoption of the standard REN model. Greater flexibility is needed to allow UbuntuNet and other Regional RENs of Africa to serve universities that can be reached but are not yet served by an operational NREN. For example, some countries simply have too few universities to sustain the overhead costs or engender the significant buying power of an NREN. To overcome this, Regional RENs could offer a “catch-all” REN service to individual institutions that are not served by a recognised NREN. Some African countries are too large, too diverse culturally and/or too patchy in their infrastructural development to enable the ready establishment of a single NREN. Instead, collaborative REN organisations could be established at the sub-national level, and Regional RENs should accept such “District RENs” as legitimate customers. A Regional REN could also act as a proxy NREN in a country in which the universities use commercial ISPs but no organised NREN has emerged, and so facilitate the founding of a real NREN.
National Research and Education Networks to support Healthcare: The Brazilian Telemedicine University Network RUTE
(2015-11) Lopes, Paulo Roberto de Lima; Simões da Silva, Nelson; Coury, Wilson Biancardi; Ribeiro Filho, José Luiz; Caetano, Daniel; Machado, Patricia Almeida; Moraes, Max Pereira; Meireles, Luan Azeredo; Brito, Thiago Delevidove de Lima Verde; Messina, Luiz Ary; Pisa, Ivan Torres; Haddad, Ana Estela; Al-Shorbaji, Nagib
Motivation: National Research and Education Networks NRENs world wide are expanding capacities, forming Academic Telehealth Community Collaboration of health scientists, bridging Science, Technology, Innovation, Education, Assistance and Health Federal Authorities to discuss, finance and work together. The World Health Organization - WHO promotes Universal Health Coverage as a goal for equitable access to health services without pushing people to poverty. Using information and communication technology to bring healthcare to people in remote areas and to those who need health services most is one of the objectives of UHC. Problem statement: RUTE, the Telemedicine University Network from Brazil, under the NREN RNP (www.rnp.br) launched July 2015 its 118th Telemedicine Unit in University and Teaching Hospitals in all 27 states. Over the network collaboration model operates 48 Special Interest Groups in health specialties with 2 to 3 scientific videoconference sessions everyday (rute.rnp.br). RUTE is part of the Brazilian Telehealth Program (www.telessaudebrasil.org.br), coordinated by the Secretariat of Work and Health Education Management (SGTES) of the Ministry of Health, that seeks to improve the quality of the service and basic care of the Unified Health System (SUS). Approach: RUTE´s objectives are: 1. Implement infrastructure for the interconnection of faculty, university hospital and teaching units from different regions of the country, enabling the communication and collaboration between national and international educational and research institutions. 2. Improve care of populations in the most underprivileged regions without specialized medical care through the resulting benefits achieved by the exchange of specialized medical knowledge. The telehealth and telemedicine centers are equipped with cutting-edge equipment, for real-time communication, connected to high performance network infrastructure operated by the RNP. Results: Also newly composing the initiative – RUTE 2.0, started in 2011, today more than half of the federal university hospitals are managed by the Brazilian Enterprise for Hospital Services http://ebserh.mec.gov.br/. In partnership with 18 Latin American Ministries of Health through the Telehealth Regional Project from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), RUTE, was certified for best practice of telemedicine by IADB, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac). Conclusions: RNP offers advanced communication infrastructure. Healthcare, R&E has demonstrated more interest and developed into a Telemedicine University Network RUTE. Important also for its sustainability lies on the participation, coordination, integration and financing from the Ministries of Science, Technology and Innovation, Education, and Health. The model taken into consideration shows how an academic network manages to bring together a number of health institutions to work together to utilize information and communication technology to bring healthcare to people in remote areas and to those who need health services most, remotely manage, collaborate, educate, monitor and evaluate. RNP/RUTE´s unquestionable statement is its ICT and Health proved qualification for remote assistance, education and collaborative research.
Implementing Mconf web conferencing at the South African National Research and Education Network
(2015-11) Isaac, Kasandra
Mconf web conferencing has been launched successfully as a South African National Research and Education Network (SA NREN) production level service from July 2015. This web conferencing service is an Open Source Multi-conference System funded mainly by the Brazilian National Research and Education Network (NREN), Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP). Mconf is a research collaboration tool that is web based and that can also be set up as a room based video conferencing system. It can be used for distance education, remote meetings or broadcasting of events and offers a range of collaboration tools such as a whiteboard, document repositories, collaboration spaces, shared notes and more. The service has been integrated with the South African Federated Identities for Research and Education (SAFIRE) to allow users to be able to access the service quickly and easily using their home institutions credentials. By integrating Mconf web conferencing with SAFIRE, the SA NREN hopes that Mconf will encourage institutions that are not registered to SAFIRE to join the federation.
Multi-Conference Rooms: Architectural and Technological View
(2015-11) Roesler, Valter; Coelho, Luiz; Longoni, Guilherme; Cecagno, Felipe; Ciuffo, Leandro; Duarte, Renato
Eduroam Implementation: Case Study Kenyatta University
(2015-11) Njue, Maureen Wanja
Executable Infrastructure for Regional Collaboration
(2015-11) Becker, Bruce
E-Infrastructure has, over the years, proven its worth in enabling scientific collaboration, even at regional and global scales. The adoption of common platforms such as HPC, data management, etc has made sharing of scientific data, applications and research outputs more appealing and is accelerating scientific output, especially in regions where these were previously unavailable - particularly Africa, and areas of the Arab-speaking world. The CHAIN-REDS and ei4Africa projects have supported the development of the Africa-Arabia Regional Operations Centre (AAROC). The ROC acts as a coordination point, first for grid infrastructures, but has been expanded to more general collaboration infrastructure services such as science gateways, federated identity providers, document and data repositories, etc. This expansion of service offering to ever-more demanding research communities places unreasonable strain on a fully-distributed model, where every site administrator is expected to understand and operate these new services. This is particularly true in the African and Arabian regions, where knowledge networks are sparse. This contribution describes a development and deployment philosophy which adopts a "DevOps" paradigm which aims to encode models of services using Ansible, with Github and Slack as collaboration platforms. Site and service configuration has been coded into Ansible playbooks, providing a reproducible model of the service, which can be customised as desired on a per-site basis. Most importantly, this model is executable, meaning that any number of sites and services can be effectively deployed remotely, by a core team. Continuous integration is done at every commit of code, by executing the playbooks on a cloud-based development site, which provides transparency to the remote site administrators. The adoption of this methodology helps to solve the problems of sustainably maintaining service configuration, improving communication between site operations and service developers, ensuring the proper state of services, and verifying the state of deployment. Some of the main benefits of this approach are speeding up the deployment of new services, reliably applying updates and recovering from disaster. In this contribution, we show that the "traditional" HPC and grid service deployment can be reproduced and improved, by adopting a more modern operations stack. However, we also highlight how this has helped to deploy advanced services- federated identity infrastructure, science gateways, application repositories, and Open Access repositories in particular throughout the region in short time, and is now playing a crucial role in the strengthening of technical and scientific collaboration networks in the region.
Virtual Research Environment for Value-Added Services in National and Regional NRENs: Case Studies
(2015-11) Prnjat, Ognjen; Liabotis, Ioannis; Kanellopoulos, Christos
Case studies are presented for the role of national and regional NRENs beyond connectivity, encompassing computing (grid, cloud and High-Performance computing) services and big data management services. The case studies are the recently started VI-SEEM and MAGIC projects. The VI-SEEM project, started in October 2015, unifies the existing e-Infrastructures in South-East Europe (SEE) and the Eastern Mediterranean (EM), including Grid, cloud, and High-Performance Computing resources. It does so in order to better utilise synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) to be provided to the scientific user communities in this large region. The overall objective is to provide a user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for scientific communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEE and EM regions; by linking networking, computing, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, software and tools. The Virtual Research Environment provides the scientists and researchers with the support in the full lifecycle of scientific research: accessing relevant data necessary for their research, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing and integrating new knowledge and data - which is stored and shared within the same VRE. The project is founded on the service-oriented data-driven approach, where a specific set of activities deals not just with simple e-Infrastructure data storage (live, dropbox-like), but includes the support for the full data lifecycle for the 3 target communities. The value-added computing services provided to the researchers include grid and cloud computing, as well as large-scale High-Performance Computing platforms, with a set of management tools provided for the unified management of computing resources. All project services will be provided through a service catalogue. Similarly the MAGIC project, started in May 2015, aims to adopt a service-oriented approach to advertising specifically the NREN cloud services, and this approach will be implemented through a compatible service catalogue, based on the GEANT cloud catalogue: thus the envisaged MAGIC cloud catalogue is also briefly discussed.

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