e-Infrastructures Roadmap

Download the 2007 e-Infrastructures roadmap: e-IRG roadmap

The e-IRG is the official maintainer of the e-Infrastructures Roadmap, a high level pan-European policy document bringing together national and supra-national e-infrastructure initiatives in Europe. The e-IRG consists of official delegations from the ministries of Education of the various European countries (go to the overview of delegates). e-IRG also coordinates these activities with international initiatives outside of Europe. The main objective of the e-IRG is to support on the political, advisory and monitoring level, the creation of a policy and administrative framework for the easy and cost-effective shared use of electronic resources in Europe across technological, administrative and national domains. On October 12th 2007 the second edition of the e-Infrastructures Roadmap was published, providing an update to the earlier Roadmap published december 2005.

History

In 2004 the Commission proposed to have a strategic roadmap for Research Infrastructures developed to cover the next 10 to 20 years, which was welcomed by the Council of Ministers during a meeting in Maastricht in July of that same year. The Council asked the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) to be responsible for the development of the roadmap. Research Infrastructures are very long term investments, and the need was felt to create a more unified long term strategic view which would enhance the coherence and continuity of the RI. The roadmaps should help answer the question:

Four complementary infrastructure roadmap working groups for four discrete areas were initiated. These are related to the following domains: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Biology and Biomedical Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities and e-Infrastructures. The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group was asked to draft the Roadmap for the European e-Infrastructures, and welcomed this honourable challenge at its meeting in The Hague on November 19, 20 04. The other areas are in the hands of our sister organisation ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures. ESFRI and e-IRG operate side by side; e-IRG focuses only on genuine general IT infrastructures irrespective of disciplines or specific sciences - encompassing networking, highly advanced computing and grids and data storage. ESFRI will deliver its first roadmaps in the second half of 2006.

Opportunities List

The first stage of the process was completed in March 2005, and resulted in a so-called "Opportunities List". This short document identifies a set of optimizing conditions and critical investment opportunities in three areas: grid infrastructure, networking infrastructure and supercomputing/data storage infrastructure. This document was adopted by the e-IRG at its meeting of March 18. 2005. The Opportunities give a high level overview of the requirements for a cost-efficient and healthy European Science Grid. It does not get involved with the financial instruments to meet those require ments or try to pinpoint the origins of funding for each action. This will have to be worked out by the Commission, national governments, science councils, NREN's and other stakeholders to make sure that there are no gaps.

Download e-IRG Opportunities List
ESFRI Opportunities List

First Edition of the Roadmap

The next step was to create the Roadmap itself. The e-IRG discussed a first draft at its meeting on June 13/14 2005 in Luxembourg. There were two ways to provide input for the Roadmap: firstly through an open expert workshop that was held on May 13 2005 in Amsterdam. As a result, a revised version was created. The e-IRG approved the first version of the Roadmap at its 2005 London meeting.

Download the first (2005) version of the e-Infrastructures roadmap: e-IRG roadmap
Or order a printed copy

e-IRG wishes to establish a creative and decidedly open process to deliver and maintain the e-Infrastructures Roadmap. If you have any comments, please contact the lead editor of the Roadmap, Michiel Leenaars.

More information:
Michiel Leenaars
editor@e-irg.org