First national service registry prototype developed by EOSC-Pillar for the Italian community

Over the course of 2021, the EOSC-Pillar Work Package "From national initiatives to transnational services" worked on the development of a prototype for national service registries, providing a first example for the Italian research community on the D4Science platform.

This prototype can be found at this link is characterised by two main features:

• the development of the catalogue is the result of a collaborative oriented co-creation activity;
• it was conceived specifically to be interoperable with the EOSC Portal Catalogue.

The D4Science infrastructure was chosen as it allows developers to create dedicated working environments to serve designated communities by providing them with the requested services. Among other things, these environments can be equipped with a customisable Catalogue for documenting and publishing relevant items, making them easily discoverable.

The model adopted takes into account a range of key aspects:

• several stakeholders drive the development of a national/thematic service registry from perspectives ranging from ownership to implementation;
• service providers are expected to be involved by the local initiative driving the catalogue development, in order to onboard their service(s) into the local registry;
• resource onboarded locally are expected to contribute to the population of aggregative catalogues, including the EOSC Portal Catalogue through agreements between the parties;
• prospective service consumers are expected to discover relevant services by using the most suitable registry/catalogue, be it the local registry or the general EOSC Catalogue;
• each registry/catalogue is free to implement additional functionalities for its users.

For this first prototype developed for the Italian community, representatives of the ICDI (Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure) which are partners in EOSC-Pillar were involved to onboard their services in the dedicated registry. The initial version of this environment was created in the summer of 2020, and became fully operational in 2021, with the first set of onboarded providers and resources. The registry is also described in the public deliverable D4.4 National Service Registry Prototype.

Italian service registry prototype