The "Blue-Cloud 2026" project (Federated European FAIR and Open Data and Services Ecosystem for research of oceans, European seas, coastal and inland waters) is a continuation of the Blue-Cloud pilot project, launched in 2019 under 'The Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative', combining the interest of developing a thematic cloud for marine sciences, and serving the pillars of Blue Economy, Marine Environment and Marine Knowledge.

The objectives of the project will provide the following core Blue-Cloud services:

• Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access Service (DD&AS): federates key Blue Data Infrastructures, helping the user to discover and retrieve data and datasets from different research domains in a unified and efficient way. These data are stored in different repositories. The DD&AS service is currently productive and provides >10 million open datasets and data products provided by 9 main domains for marine physics, chemistry, bathymetry, geology, biology, genomics and biodiversity.
• Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE): a research environment that facilitates collaborative research using a wide variety of data resources, analytical tools and computational resources. This environment, complemented by generic services such as publishing, visualization and documentation, provides the means to create Virtual Labs (VL). Virtual Labs (VL) are essentially a collection of computational, analytical and generic services that can be orchestrated by researchers to create the appropriate flow of service usage to manage a domain problem.
• Blue-Cloud Virtual Labs: five VLs have been deployed so far as a demonstration for open science and to illustrate how interdisciplinary research can support solving complex ocean-related challenges.

Blue Cloud 2026 will offer, as a benefit, a further evolution of the blue Cloud pilot project ecosystem into a federated European Ecosystem providing FAIR and Open data and data services, which are crucial for ocean, European marine, coastal and inland water research.

The main role of GRNET will involve the following:

• FAIR compliant Discovery and Access services for marine domains & beyond
• Blue-Cloud VRE platform evolution and integration with EOSC resources and services

More specifically, GRNET will be involved in the following implementations:

• Optimising the functioning of the Data Discovery & Access Service
• Horizontal expansion: federation of additional Blue Data Infrastructures
• Vertical expansion: developing and deploying data lakes
• Blue-Cloud VRE evolution of common services, including establishing Blue-Cloud centralised identity federation
• EOSC Blue Task Force for Blue-Cloud integrating with EOSC core services and adopting EOSC principles such as for user data management

The project is implemented under the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON).