The Digital Infrastructures for Research 2017 (DI4R) conference took place on 30 November – 1 December in Brussels. More than 400 participants joined this conference organised by Europe’s leading e-infrastructures – EGI, EUDAT, GÉANT, OpenAIRE, PRACE and RDA Europe. Under the theme “Connecting the building blocks for Open Science”, the conference showcased the policies, processes, best practices, data and services that are the building blocks of the European Open Science Cloud and European Data Infrastructure.

The eInfraCentral’s interactive session on the first day of the conference officially launched a beta version of the eInfraCentral Portal. Enrique Gomez from the DG Connect (Unit C1 – e–Infrastructures & Science Cloud) at the European Commission outlined a rationale behind the eInfraCentral (European e-Infrastructure Services Gateway) project. Dr Jelena Angelis from EFIS presented a mission of eInfraCentral and its key activities. Dr Jorge-A. Sanchez-P. from JNP took the audience through the work behind creating a service catalogue in order to address such challenges as a diverse vocabulary about Service Management (SM) in the community; different standards and frameworks for SM; different levels of adoptions of SM practices among the Service Providers (SPs); different processes to manage service portfolios employed at different locations; not the same maturity in description of service offerings, listings or catalogues by SPs; numerous ways of representing services to the users on the web; and no adopted APIs for exchanging service-related information among SPs. Dr George Papastefanatos from the University of Athens showed the functionalities of the beta version of the eInfraCentral gateway and the three (out of five) e-Infra partners in the eInfraCentral project (EUDAT, EGI, OpenAIRE, GÉANT and PRACE) shared their views on the benefits the eInfraCentral project and the portal brings to the community.

All attendees of this interactive sessions were encouraged to test the current version of the portal and leave their feedback. Everybody in the community (whether a researcher, a service provider or a policy maker) are welcome to provide their feedback too.

Please visit, test and comment on the beta version of the eInfraCentral portal!