Dates: 8-12 May 2017

Venue: University of Pisa, Italy

An e-Infrastructure is a distributed network of service nodes, residing on multiple sites and managed by one or more organizations. E-Infrastructures allow scientists residing at distant places to collaborate. They offer a multiplicity of facilities as-a-service, supporting data sharing and usage at different levels of abstraction, e.g. data transfer, data harmonization, data processing workflows etc. e-Infrastructures are gaining an important place in the field of biodiversity conservation. Their computational capabilities help scientists to reuse models, obtain results in shorter time and share these results with other colleagues. They are also used to access several and heterogeneous biodiversity catalogues.

In this course, the D4Science e-Infrastructure will be used to conduct experiments in the field of biodiversity conservation. D4Science hosts models and contributions by several international organizations involved in the biodiversity conservation field. The course will give students an overview of the models, the practices and the methods that large international organizations like FAO and UNESCO apply by means of D4Science. At the same time, the course will introduce students to the basic concepts under e-Infrastructures, Virtual Research Environments, data sharing and experiments reproducibility and repeatability. Hands-on exercises, using on-line Web interfaces, will allow students to practically apply models to a number of datasets and will practically show how a Computer Science system can meet modern Open Science requirements.

For more information, click here.