VI-SEEM

In the last decade, a number of initiatives were crucial for enabling high-quality research - by providing e-Infrastructure resources, application support and training - in both South East Europe (SEE) and Eastern Mediterranean (EM). They helped reduce the digital divide and brain drain in Europe, by ensuring access to regional e-Infrastructures to new member states, states on path to ascension, and states in European Neighborhood Policy area – in total 14 countries in SEE and 6 in EM. This VI-SEEM proposal brings together these e-Infrastructures to build capacity and better utilize synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the inter-disciplinary scientific user communities in the combined SEE and EM regions (SEEM). The overall objective is to provide user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for regional cross-border Scientific Communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEEM region; by linking compute, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, models, software and tools. This VRE will provide the scientists and researchers with the support in full lifecycle of collaborative research: accessing and sharing relevant research data, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing new knowledge and data - which can be stored and shared in the same VRE. Climatology and Life Science communities are directly relevant for Societal Challenges. The driving ambition of this proposal is to maintain leadership in enabling e-Infrastructure based research and innovation in the region for the 3 strategic regional user communities: supporting multidisciplinary solutions, advancing their research, and bridging the development gap with the rest of Europe. The VI-SEEM consortium brings together e-Infrastructure operators and Scientific Communities in a common endeavor.