e-IRG Roadmap 2012

With the Roadmap 2012, e-IRG presents a vision of the future of e-Infrastructures in Europe . An advanced e-Infrastructure Commons will be necessary to implement the Innovation Union1 and the Digital Agenda2, two essential flagships of the EU’s 2020 Strategy3 . e-Infrastructure is used to refer to an environment to share research and educational resources (e .g . network, computers, storage, software, data) so that these resources can easily be accessed and used by academia, researchers and scientists as required . The value to the users of any infrastructure is not in the infrastructure itself, but in the “leverage” it provides on (new) competitive “core activi- ties” of the users, which make is difficult to create sustainable business models for the exploitation of infrastructures . Commons4 is used as resource management principle by which a resource is shared within a community .5 This Roadmap 2012 presents the principles of the political, techno- logical, and administrative framework for an easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe: the e-Infrastructure Commons