A Bridge Between Continents: KISTI and EGI’s Interoperability Success
Between April and September 2024, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Stichting EGI achieved a significant milestone with a successful bilateral collaborative project. The project aimed to define and validate interoperability methodology between the Korean Research Data Commons (KRDC) system and the EGI distributed compute infrastructure, as well as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
KRDC is the next-generation implementation of KISTI’s DataON system, aiming to provide an advanced distributed environment for Korean research communities to discover, access, process, and share research data. Gergely Sipos, the Head of Services, Solutions and Support Department of Stichting EGI, was the EGI lead of the bilateral project and presented the results to relevant stakeholders at KISTI in Daejeon in October 2024.
After an initial analysis and design phase, the project focused on the technical interoperability of KRDC and EGI in the following areas:
- User authentication and authorisation: Enable cross-infrastructure access of KISTI and EGI to Korean and European users based on the EGI Check-in service, using identity providers and the EduGAIN policy framework.
- File access and transfer: Discover and download files from EGI repositories through the EGI DataHub service, empowering Korean researchers to reuse and process data from their European colleagues within KRDC compute resources.
The 6-month long project led to a series of achievements:
- Status and technology analysis of EGI and EOSC from the KRDC perspective
- Compatibility study between the services and protocols of EGI and KRDC
- Definition of various EGI - KRDC interoperability scenarios, together with respective risk-benefit-cost analysis
- Definition of financial and operational considerations for an EOSC-like system in Korea
- A user-centric assessment of the KRDC system
- Recommendations for possible future KISTI - EGI collaboration topics
Based on these achievements, EGI and KISTI are considering running a second phase project, working towards interoperable systems that enable intercontinental open science. Such a phase would include scientific communities that require coordinated data and resource sharing between EGI/EOSC and Korean repositories and cloud sites.
The project team, from left to right: Barun Hwang (Researcher), Minhee Cho (Principal Researcher), Sa-kwang Song (Principal Researcher), Hyung-Jun Yim (Director of the Research Data Sharing Center), Gergely Sipos (EGI-KISTI Project Lead from Stichting EGI), Mikyoung Lee (Leader of the KRDC Team), Dasol Kim (Researcher), Wonhee Lee (Researcher), and Sungbae Choi (Principal Researcher).
