National Research Council of Italy
The Institute of Information Science and Technologies (CNR-ISTI) is located in Pisa, Italy, and its main mission is to producing scientific excellence and playing an active role in technology transfer. Part of the largest research institution in Italy (the National Research Council, or CNR), CNR-ISTI is organised in 16 technology centres or labs, each of them pursuing a well-defined set of scientific objectives. State-of-the-art technology development and training are other activities performed by the centres.
The team participating in this project belongs to the 'Multimedia Networked Information System Laboratory', which consists of 60 researchers and technicians conducting research and development of (i) software architectures and systems supporting data infrastructures and large distributed multimedia information systems and (ii) technologies for the management, distribution and fruition of multimedia and multi-type information and data. This team has a long experience in participating to many EU-funded projects relevant to the topics addressed in the BlueBRIDGE proposal. In particular, the team has coordinated from the scientific point of view the stream of projects DILIGENT-D4Science-D4ScienceII-iMarine that has been played a central role in the definition and implementation of Virtual Research Environments and e-Infrastructure ecosystem. The team has also coordinated/coordinates from the technical point of view the stream of projects DRIVER-DRIVERII-OpenAIREOpenAIREplus, and the most recent OpenAIRE2020.Other related projects the team has taken part in 7th FP are: EFG and EFG1914, HOPE, EAGLE, EuropeanaV1, SAPIR, ASSETS, VENUS-C, DL.org and GRDI2020. It also participates in RDA-Europe project.
In the context of the project, the CNR-ISTI is Project Coordinator, Project Manager, and Technical Director.
Key members
Dr. Donatella Castelli is Senior Researcher at CNR-ISTI and leader of the InfraScience research group. Her research interests include digital libraries and data infrastructure content modeling, interoperability and architectures. She is author of several research papers in such fields. Under her supervision, the InfraScience team coordinated and participated in several EU and nationally funded projects on Digital Libraries and Research Data Infrastructures. In particular, she has been the scientific coordinator of the D4Science and iMarine projects. Dr. Castelli is also a member of the RDA Europe Expert Group that that promotes research and cross-infrastructure coordination at global level. Currently, she is currently technical manager of the OpenAIREPlus & OpenAIRE2020 projects.
Dr. Pasquale Pagano is a senior researcher at CNR-ISTI. He has a strong background and experience on models, methodologies and techniques for the design and development of distributed virtual research environments (VREs) which require the handling of heterogeneous computational and storage resources, provided by Grid and Cloud based e-Infrastructures, and management of heterogeneous data sources. He participated in the design of the most relevant distributed systems and e-Infrastructure enabling middleware developed by ISTI - CNR. He is currently the Technical Director of the D4Science Data Infrastructure and he is serving the iMarine Data Initiative as a consultant. In the past, he has been involved in the iMarine, EUBrazilOpenBio, ENVRI, Venus-C, GRDI2020, D4Science-II, D4Science, Diligent, DRIVER, DRIVER II, BELIEF, BELIEF II, Scholnet, Cyclades, and ARCA European projects.
Dr. Leonardo Candela is a researcher at CNR-ISTI. He has relevant expertise in the area of Virtual Research Environments development. He was involved in various EU-funded projects including CYCLADES, Open Archives Forum, DILIGENT, DRIVER, DELOS, D4Science, D4Science-II, DL.org, EUBrazilOpenBio, iMarine, ENVRI. He was a member of the DELOS Reference Model Technical Committee and of the OAI-ORE Liaison Group.His research interests include Data Infrastructures, Virtual Research Environments, Data Publication, Open Science, Digital Library [Management] Systems and Architectures, Digital Libraries Models, Distributed Information Retrieval, and Grid and Cloud Computing.
Massimiliano Assante. Massimiliano is a computer science researcher of the "Institute of Information Science and Technologies" (ISTI), an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). He holds a Ph.D. on Information Engineering and a master degree (M.Sc.) on Information Technologies, both received from the University of Pisa, Italy. His scientific and professional activity involves the Research and Development on Research Infrastructures, Scientific Repositories, Virtual Research Environments and NoSQL Data Stores. Massimiliano joined ISTI in 2007, he worked for several EU Projects such as iMarine, EUBrazilOpenBio, D4Science II, D4Science and DILIGENT. Within these projects, he progressively covered different positions, ranging from software engineer (web services and front-end web applications) to system designer and operations manager.