Growing awareness over the past decades around the limitation of resources and the need for sustainability is impacting the global economy, as well as funded initiatives. According to the European Union, sustainable development means “meeting the needs of the present whilst ensuring future generations can meet their own needs.” The concept revolves around three pillars: economic, environmental and social.
In the EXTRACT project, sustainability is a key driver for scientific, technical and business decisions. On the technical and scientific levels, Open Science principles are applied to facilitate the use of results by other parties. Most of the project infrastructure components are Open Source. Furthermore, EXTRACT is part of communities like the DataNexus cluster, which gathers seven pioneering projects tackling extreme data challenges from IoT, business, environmental, and societal sources. This cluster shares knowledge and drives synergies on data challenges, to advance Europe’s capacity for data and next-gen computing technologies (see our joint video here).
Adequation with current and future needs is also essential to ensure the sustainable development of the project. The two project use cases, the Personalized Evacuation Route system in Venice – crisis management in a city, and TASKA – monitoring of solar activity thanks to big data analysis, both triggered interest from research institutes and private bodies during conferences and fairs. In addition, additional industrial use cases in health, environment, smart cities were identified during a Hackathon co-organized by Binare with business students from the union of Nordic business students.
Sharing project results for research or commercial purposes, like product development by investors, is another key challenge that the EXTRACT project is working on to make project results available. Public and private marketplaces for edge and cloud applications are being considered as channels through which to share results. One such candidate is the Nuvla.io marketplace, from SixSq, which hosts and allows deployment in one-click containerized applications on edge devices and cloud resources, using Docker or Kubernetes.
Nuvla is made of two main components:
- The NuvlaEdge agent, which turns any hardware into an edge device, and
- The Nuvla.io Platform-as-a-Service, which allows remote management of edge devices and deployment of containerized applications on edge or cloud resources. Nuvla.io allows deployment of single and complex components.
The project is also investigating different public research marketplaces where project results can be shared. An EXTRACT project profile has been created on the AIonDemand platform, a platform dedicated to the sustainability of EU project results.
We are confident that these initiatives, together with dissemination, exploitation, community building activities and the inclusivity and diversity values shared by the Consortium members will ensure the sustainability of EXTRACT. In the last year of the project we will ensure that project results live on past the project’s contractual end to inspire a new generation of data analysis technologies.