Italian Infrastructures and COVID-19

The Italian Research Infrastructures and e-Infrastructures responded to the current COVID-19 crisis by creating new access modalities to scientific data and facilities, in line with the European effort.

ICDI provided support to the survey on Open infrastructure resources supporting research on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 in Italy, which was launched by the Italian ESFRI delegates and the national representative in the EOSC Governing Board. The results of the survey are summarised in a document submitted to the Italian MInistry of Research, to the EOSC Governing Board and to ESFRI.

It is worth highlighting that the Italian and European infrastructures have quickly adopted interactive remote access procedures for their users, also in consideration of the difficulty to foresee when restrictions to national and international mobility will be lifted. In the current circumstances, Research Infrastructures capable of offer remote access to observing and experimental facilities and open data through EOSC will be the backbone of European Research.

Download the results of the SURVEY OF ITALIAN INFRASTRUCTURES' ACTIVITIES ON SARS-CoV-2 AND COVID-19

download (365 KB)

COVID-19 - Towards a common metadata platform

By appointment of the European Commission and in collaboration with existing European initiatives, EMBL-EBI implemented the COVID-19 platform portal.
Its single aim is to interconnect the main data-related activities on COVID-19 on virus genome, human genome and human phenotypes, thus facilitating the access to key resources in this field, that can boast consolidated standards and high quality data.

However, metadata standards do not esist for all data types. For this reason the creation of a metadata catalogue for clinical data and data on the relation between human phenotypes and virus is currently being discussion, as the lack of a metadata standard for these categories prevents the COVID-19 platform to manage them. In this perspective, the Italian representative in the EOSC Governing Board presented to the EC and the EOSC governanca contribution for the discussion.

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