D4Science: DIstributed colLaboratories Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology for Science. Project Final Report

This final report gives an account of the objectives and results of the D4S Project. The main objectives of D4Science were to create a production quality e-Infrastructure for addressing the needs of two major target disciplines: Environmental Monitoring and Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management. This e-Infrastructure has been obtained by deploying, progressively enriching and consolidating the ones built by the EGEE and DILIGENT projects, and now it gives scientists of the addressed and other challenging areas more facilities for creating Virtual Research Environments (VREs) based on shared computation, storage, and generic service resources as well as on data and domain-specific service resources. Computation, storage, and generic service resources are offered by EGEE, project partners and their collaborators at a European level, while data and domain-specific service resources are offered by large international organizations, such as the European Space Agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research. The D4Science e-Infrastructure is expected to provide a multiplicative benefit to many scientific fields, and also act as a catalyst for the kind of cooperation and cross fertilization among multiple communities that is necessary for addressing many grand challenges of science and society.