EPOS Open Source: A platform for integrating high-quality research products and services.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is releasing a pan-European research infrastructure (RI) for Solid-Earth sciences that targets different scientific communities. The EPOS RI enables sharing of data and resources; promoting collaboration, harmonization of practices and methods, fosters innovation and novel scientific discoveries. These principles of scientific and technological collaboration are the basis of the concepts of Open Source and Open Collaboration.

EPOS consists of essentially two components: firstly, the so-called Thematic Core Services (TCS) representing the Data providers from the scientific domains (e.g., Seismology, Satellite data etc.); secondly, the central integration node, namely the ICS-C (Integrated Core Services – Central Hub), representing the integrating ICT (Information and Communication Technology) system underpinning the EPOS Data Portal.

EPOS is currently releasing the Open-Source version of its architecture, based on microservices, which includes a GUI (Graphical User Interface) implementing the Data Portal, i.e., the human oriented interface for accessing the assets made available by the TCS. It communicates with the ICS-C system by means of RESTful APIs which also implement AAAI (authentication, authorization, accounting infrastructure). Through the APIs, the Data Portal queries the metadata catalog to discover and contextualize assets of interest provided by the TCS and documented as metadata.

In order to integrate heterogeneous datasets from the TCS, appropriate metadata and semantic descriptions are used to drive interactions with TCS resources or to construct a workflow to be executed across TCS.

EPOS Open Source also includes a microservice to enable the interaction with large-scale computing resources or geoscience software services, represented in EPOS as ICS-D (Integrated Core Services – Distributed). The different processing done through the ICS-D on the TCS data are also metadata driven, the software executed on the ICS-D, which enable additional features and functionalities to the ICS-C core, have their own metadata description and through a plugin architecture run on the ICS-D.

The architecture is designed to integrate with e-Infrastructures such as GRID or CLOUD facilities and particularly ongoing work includes achieving interoperability with EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) by means of FAIR web services. The EPOS architecture has also been used as a template in other initiatives such as other Environmental Science RIs (e.g., ENVRI Catalogue of Services) and Jerico.

In the presentation we will describe the work done so far and the key concept that brought to the adoption of a microservice based, open-source released architecture, and provide perspectives for future extension of the project.