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TheLong-Term Data Preservation Task Force(LTDP TF) of the EOSC Association has since its establishment worked on mapping the status and further clarification of the meaning of long-term preservation within the EOSC. This work has resulted in anoverview and discussion paperto presents the context, activities and ongoing issues surrounding the EOSC Association Long Term Data Preservation Task Force. The paper describes our approach on preservation in the context of EOSC concerning outcomes, systems, and actions with attention to the vision, roles, finance, and networks needed to deliver preservation for FAIR digital objects in the EOSC. This document is intended to collect community feedback on our approach as well as future recommendations to be considered. We kindly ask the community for feedback on our approach as well as future recommendations to be considered through a short survey: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/TFLTDPsurvey2023

In this technical report we want to describe the underlying architecture of the INAF VOSpace from the system administrator point of view.

Nella storia recente dell’Astrofisica le infrastrutture informatiche sia di calcolo che di archiviazione e fruizione degli archivi sono state di crescente importanza per la produzione di risultati scientifici di eccellenza. Infrastrutture di piccola e media scala, dalla workstation individuale al centro di calcolo di struttura, hanno lasciato posto alla necessità di accesso a medie e grandi infrastrutture centralizzate a cui garantire accesso ai ricercatori. L’adesione dell’INAF a grandi infrastrutture di ricerca di livello mondiale, ad esempio SKA e CTA, e il crescente proliferare di iniziative nazionali, europee e mondiali di creazioni di cluster di calcolo o cloud di archiviazione condivisi, ha ulteriormente innalzato il livello di esigenze, correnti e future, della comunità scientifica rendendo opportuno un cambio di passo a livello di Ente nell’approvvigionamento, gestione, offerta e coordinamento delle risorse di calcolo ed archiviazione per l’Astrofisica. Esiste pertanto un generale consenso nella comunità circa la necessità di riformare ed aggiornare l’offerta di Information technology (ICT) interna ad INAF per adeguarla alle nuove sfide che si prospettano all’orizzonte, legate ad un ruolo sempre più crescente della componente informatica nella produzione, qualificazione, conservazione e fruibilità del dato osservativo e teorico in Astronomia e Astrofisica. La via maestra, in linea con le tendenze internazionali, è la centralizzazione della ubicazione ed erogazione delle risorse in un contesto di competenze distribuite. Infatti una proliferazione non coordinata di centri di calcolo di piccole dimensioni, quanto si otterrebbe distribuendo senza criterio le componenti di nuova acquisizione presso le varie strutture di ricerca, implicherebbe una crescita dei costi indiretti ed una riduzione dell'efficienza del sistema complessivo causata dalla frammentazione. Passi importanti in questa direzione sono già stati intrapresi dall’Ente. Tra questi il più rilevante è senza dubbio l’investimento nel “tecnopolo” di Bologna, occasione per una azione integrata in un contesto dinamico e riconosciuto a livello governativo e nazionale ed in una prospettiva di medio-lungo termine. Altri importanti passi intermedi sono resi possibili da opportunità come quella recentemente concretizzata di rilevare in comodato d’uso parti del cluster denominato “Galileo” in via di dismissione da parte del CINECA. Questo documento presenta una analisi di scenario delle esigenze attuali o previste per il prossimo futuro in termini di infrastrutture informatiche, l’offerta attualmente disponibile a copertura di queste esigenze e la prospettiva di evoluzione dell’offerta a copertura delle esigenze previste. Il documento include inoltre una proposta di futura governance del settore, basata su un soggetto attuatore autonomo, la e-infrastructure di INAF, ed un soggetto preposto al coordinamento, controllo e ruolo abilitante per il settore, la UTG “Astrofisica Computazionale”.

System engineering and project-team management are essential tools to ensure the project success and the Redmine is a valuable platform for the work organization and for a system engineered approach. We review in this work the management needs related to our project, and suggest the possibility that they fit to many research activities with a similar scenario: small team, technical difficulties (or unknowns), intense activity sprints and long pauses due to external schedule management, a large degree of shared leadership. We will then present our implementation with the Redmine, showing that the use of the platform resulted in a strong engagement and commitment of the team. The explicit goal of this work is also to rise, at least internally, the awareness about team needs and available organizational tools and methods; and to highlight a shareable approach to team management and small scale system engineering.

Si desidera infine ringraziare tutti i colleghi che hanno contribuito alla stesura delle schede., Si �� pi�� volte ricordato che tra la strumentazione avanzata per l���osservazione dell���Universo un ruolo essenziale, e non secondario, va allo strumento IT nel suo insieme. Questo strumento si compone di diverse componenti, dal hardware al software fino al networking tra il ���capitale umano���. Armonizzare, sviluppare ed integrare adeguatamente le varie componenti ha permesso e permette ai progetti di ottenere un livello di eccellenza nazionale ed internazionale, ma la loro armonizzazione sta diventando complicata soprattutto in vista dei grandi progetti e della sostenibilit�� dell���infrastruttura. L���ICT dell���INAF fino al 2021 ha cercato di valorizzare l���esperienza acquisita nei vari campi IT facendo da stimolo nella creazione di gruppi di lavoro sulle varie tematiche, organizzando corsi su strumenti specifici, linguaggi di programmazione, e sviluppando un prototipo organizzativo per una infrastruttura pi�� ampia che non fosse dedicata al singolo progetto, ma che permettesse l���ottimizzazione, soprattutto del capitale umano, necessario per i singoli progetti e per le attivit�� di ���long tail of science���. Data la richiesta di riorganizzazione l���IT in INAF, si e��� voluto fare uno snapshoot della situazione attuale, e di quella di sicura acquisizione, in modo da poter meglio organizzare i prossimi passi infrastrutturali. Si ���e quindi richiesta la collaborazione dei direttori delle Strutture, dei responsabili dei progetti e della comunit�� tutta affinch�� compili in modo adeguato le schede della loro infrastruttura scientifica IT sopra un certo livello di core e Storage (indicativamente sopra i 100 core e i 100 TB di storage). Il disegno che ne risulta �� una mappa frammentata di HW, in parte derivante anche da infrastruttura non direttamente dell���INAF. Non �� lo scopo di questo documento quello di voler estrapolare conclusioni, ma serve per tenere traccia dell���infrastruttura IT, e quindi si pensa di aggiornarlo regolarmente.

INAF Technical reports are documents concerning methodologies, projects, instrumental applications and innovation, data harvesting techniques, handbooks and software produced in the various disciplinary fields.

The National Institute for Astrophysics in 2017 decided to adopt an open access institutional repository for collecting all their scientific production. The idea of putting into practice the principles of open access could no longer been procrastinated, after a series of indications from the European Union and after the official positions taken by the Institute itself: namely the European Commission’s Recommendation on access to scientific information and its conservation, the document of the Italian Ministry of Research on the European Horizon 2020 programme, the signature of the Position statement on open access to the results of scientific research in Italy. Already between 2012 and 2013 in Europe it was established that the scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public grants by at least 50% should be published in Open Access Journals, or made available through Open Access Repositories within 6 months from the publishing date. At the end of 2017, the INAF Scientific Directorate finally welcomed the proposal to acquire DSpace-CRIS, a software developed by 4Science and used by over 70 Universities and research Institutions in Italy, and over 20 Institutes abroad. A heterogeneous Working Group consisting of librarians and computer specialists and scientists worked on the configuration of the hardware and software and at the same time drafted an Open Access Policy, having as a model the text developed by the CRUI (Conference of Italian University Rectors) Open Access Working Group. ?In OA@INAF (https://openaccess.inaf.it) you find not only the common scientific literature (articles, proceedings, books), but also grey literature in particular technical reports (see Giovanna Caprio’s poster). The talk illustrates the various phases of the project, how the software works, the problems encountered and the solutions found. A help site (https://openaccess-info.inaf.it) has also been developed to support users.

The report summarises the views expressed by the Italian Computing and Data Initiative (ICDI) in response to the open consultation for the EOSC Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), closed on the 31st of August. It provides insightful input and suggestions about the current draft of the SRIA document shared with the wider EOSC community, with the aim of helping to shape the future vision of the European Open Science Cloud.

The amount of data delivered by modern instrumentation and observing techniques is bringing radio astronomy in the era of Big Data, and the nowadays widely adopted Open Data policies allow free and open access to data from many radio astronomy facilities. A fundamental ingredient to enable Open Science in the radio astronomical community and to engage also public participation (the so called Citizen Science) is thus the availability of public archives in which data can be accessed and searched with modern software tools. A web-based, VO-compliant public archive has been built to host data from the Italian radio telescopes managed by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). The archive main features consist in the capability to handle the various types of data coming from the different observing instrumentation at the telescopes; the adoption of a policy to guarantee the data proprietary period; the accessibility of data through a web interface and the adoption of VO standards to allow for successful scientific exploitation of the archive itself in the data mining era. We present the progress status of the public Data Archive for the Italian radio telescopes being developed to provide the international community with a state-of-the-art archive for radio astronomical data.

VIALACTEA is a project to facilitate the study of star formation in our Galaxy based on various galactic surveys from past years. This survey data is available in the form of FITS files which are accessed through a web service developed by IA2 (Italian center for Astronomical Archives) at INAF-OATs. The service handles ≍ 40000 3-D radio cubes and 2-D images, originating from about 20 surveys, each offering data on several molecular emission lines. All the data is accessible from one interface in the form of a web service, offering the common search, cutout and merge functions.

Among the scientific goals of the EU-FP7 VIALACTEA project, there are some that involve tasks like archiving, discovering and accessing catalogues of infrared and sub-mm objects that are not simple point-like sources on the sky, but compact or diffuse structures. These structures may have more general shapes (bubble-like or filament-like - the two categories identified by the project). Also, alongside catalogue search and access, a service to match compact sources that are located inside a more diffuse structure like a bubble or a filament, is needed. Here we describe: the scenario and catalogues related to the project scientific tasks, and the solutions put in place to grant the VIALACTEA (and astrophysical community) users interaction with these compact and diffuse object catalogue data. Shape and contour archiving techniques inside a catalogue as well as catalogue cross-matching using tessellation solutions are here described.

The SKA project is an international effort (10 member and 10 associated countries with the involvement of 100 companies and research institutions) to build the world's largest radio telescope. The SKA Telescope Manager (TM) is the core package of the SKA Telescope aimed at scheduling observations, controlling their execution, monitoring the telescope and so on. To do that, TM directly interfaces with the Local Monitoring and Control systems (LMCs) of the other SKA Elements (e.g. Dishes), exchanging commands and data with them by using the TANGO controls framework. TM in turn needs to be monitored and controlled, in order its continuous and proper operation is ensured. This higher responsibility together with others like collecting and displaying logging data to operators, performing lifecycle management of TM applications, directly deal - when possible - with management of TM faults (which also includes a direct handling of TM status and performance data) and interfacing with the virtualization platform compose the TM Services (SER) package that is discussed and presented in the present paper., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain

The international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project to build two radio interferometers is approaching the end of its design phase, and gearing up for the beginning of formal construction. A key part of this distributed Observatory is the overall software control system: the Telescope Manager (TM). The two telescopes, a Low frequency dipole array to be located in Western Australia (SKA-Low) and a Mid-frequency dish array to be located in South Africa (SKA-Mid) will be operated as a single Observatory, with its global headquarters (GHQ) based in the United Kingdom at Jodrell Bank. When complete it will be the most powerful radio observatory in the world. The TM software must combine the observatory operations based at the GHQ with the monitor and control operations of each telescope, covering the range of domains from proposal submission to the coordination and monitoring of the subsystems that make up each telescope. It must also monitor itself and provide a reliable operating platform. This paper will provide an update on the design status of TM, covering the make-up of the consortium delivering the design, a brief description of the key challenges and the top level architecture, and its software development plans for tackling the construction phase of the project. It will also briefly describe the consortium’s response to the SKA Project’s decision in the second half of 2016 to adopt the processes set out by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for system architecture design and documentation, including a re-evaluation of its deliverables, documentation and approach to internal reviews., Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy V, June 10-15, 2018, Austin, USA, Series: Proceedings of SPIE; no. 10707

This report detailed the work done in the GAPS2 programme up to now. The goal of the project is to take advantage of the unique capabilities of GIARPS to study the origin of planetary systems diversity shaped by variable degrees of orbital evolution, exploring uncharted territory in the realm of planet formation and evolution with emphasis on the innermost regions.

SKA (Square Kilometer Array) is a project aimed to build a very large radio-telescope, composed by thousands of antennae and related support systems. The overall orchestration is performed by the Telescope Manager (TM), a suite of software applications. In order to ensure the proper and uninterrupted operation of TM, a local monitoring and control system is developed, called TM Services. Fault Management (FM) is one of these services, and is composed by processes and infrastructure associated with detecting, diagnosing and fixing faults, and finally returning to normal operations. The aim of the study, introducing artificial intelligence algorithms during the detection phase, is to build a predictive model, based on the history and statistics of the system, in order to perform trend analysis and failure prediction. Based on monitoring data and health status detected by the software system monitor and on log files gathered by the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) server, the predictive model ensures that the system is operating within its normal operating parameters and takes corrective actions in case of failure., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain

A complete astrophysical publishing environment, working as a helper system for an astrophysical data center, requires various components, from custom data back ends up to more or less standardized (e.g. Virtual Observatory driven) front end solutions. Combining this environment into one framework can lead to a potentially non scalable or hardly improvable system. In this contribution we describe what we are planning and developing to take advantage of cloud computing infrastructures and of a modular/distributed component architecture to provide a scalable and maintainable publishing environment at the Italian center for Astronomical Archives (IA2) at the INAF (Italian National Institute for Astrophysics) Astronomical Observatory of Trieste. Using a set of modular services, connected by registered interfaces, we are planning to use automated balancing at the front end to allocate services on demand in a cloud environment and allow generic data access in the back end archive solution.