The following text is a concise presentation of the vision, scope, and purpose of HELIX originally prepared in November 2013. It continuous to serve as the anchor point of our work.

Motivation

The Data Economy, a new form of economic activity founded on extracting value from Big Data, is recognized to lead EU’s financial growth and cross-sectoral competiveness for the next decade. The Data Economy is fueled from data-intensive research, i.e. innovations in managing, integrating, collating, and analyzing data. Greek researchers are worldwide leaders in this field. However, their excellence cannot be sustained, nor nourished. Greece is currently lacking in data infrastructures in support of cross-domain, data-intensive research. This emerging divergence with the EU is harmful for the quality, timeliness and relevance of scientific output, as well as the national economy, materializing as a lost opportunity for capitalizing the Data Economy potential.

HELIX is the Greek scientific eInfrastructure to support the entire life-cycle of data-intensive research: from scientific data processing under elastic and cost-effective cloud services, to data publication, and packaging with the corresponding scientific information phases.

Objectives

HELIX will establish a scalable cloud-based data infrastructure, providing data management, processing, analysis, and archiving services for all types of scientific data. HELIX is positioned as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud infrastructure, built upon the existing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) of GRNET. As such, it follows the successful cost-effective paradigm of similar scientific and commercial data infrastructures worldwide, which leverage the underlying investments in hardware and connectivity. On a PaaS level, HELIX will provide programmatic frameworks to researchers for storing, managing, invoking, processing, analyzing, and visualizing scientific data over diverse cloud databases (e.g. tubular, time-series, raster, linked). Essentially, researchers will be able to reuse their existing processing and analysis workflows, without requiring any local infrastructure and thus limitations in terms of storage, processing power, maintenance or know-how. On the SaaS level, HELIX will provide web services to support scientific research in terms of scientific data management, data discovery/reuse, and collaboration.

The HELIX services will be offered to the research community as a whole, addressing in a cost-effective manner the lack of vertical data infrastructures, and the data-intensive needs across all scientific fields. Further, HELIX will assume the role of the EU infrastructure OpenAIRE for Greece, interlinking research data and publications, and thus maximizing visibility and marketability of scientific output. HELIX is EU’s spearheading eInfrastructure for promoting Open Access policies in FP7/H2020, offering services in the entire EU research community, and being coordinated by Athena. In addition to its data services provisional nature, HELIX will serve as the Greek Research Information System that will provide monitoring services for research impact assessment and policy evaluation, providing links to its European counterparts.

HELIX is unique in Greece in terms of focus, services, and wide-reaching impact. The provided data management and analysis services are addressing emerging challenges and needs of the scientific community in a cost-effective and scalable manner. Scientific data will be stored, processed and analyzed to extract insights and added value regardless of their size, complexity, type, and availability of local infrastructures. The horizontal nature of HELIX inherently promotes collaboration for data-intensive research across scientific domains. HELIX will support SME innovation through low-cost experimentation and service provision. Further, it will aid the public sector through readily available services across its data management and analysis needs.

HELIX is an open venture in its core. It will be based on open source software and deliver technical advancements with an open knowledge license in order to fuel local innovation. Further, it will implement and safeguard EU’s Open Access policies to scientific data and publications and will serve and provide the business logic of future data management planning. The sustainability of HELIX will be ensured through a balanced revenue stream of competitive EU funding, and commercial provision of data-intensive services for the private sector.

HELIX will establish Greece as the leading data-intensive research hub on a regional level, ensure Greece’s inclusion in the Data Economy ($3-7 trillion), and implement the Big Data Strategy outlined by the EC in the Digital Agenda.

HELIX will provide a competitive advantage to Greek researchers and SMEs, produce a new generation of data-trained researchers, introduce SMEs in the Data Economy, propose and assist new business models, achieve economies of scale in research activities, and provide tangible spill-over effects regarding financial growth in Greece. Based on international studies (40% annual growth of the sector) and our local experience (20M Euros benefits from the low-cost data infrastructure geodata.gov.gr) we expect benefits (direct and indirect) for Greece’s economy to be at least an order of magnitude greater that the investment and operating costs of HELIX.

The development of HELIX will span over 7 years, with early services being available from the first 6 months. HELIX ensures economies of scale and network effects by leveraging the existing cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service of GRNET.

Governance

The Coordinating Body of HELIX is ATHENA RC. In its early stages HELIX will be operated by a dedicated Unit established within ATHENA, which will evolve into an appropriate legal entity. The Governance scheme comprises the Project Coordinator, supported by his Project Office, handling the overall and day-to-day project coordination. The Project Board provides Strategic and Technical guidance through the Steering and Technical Committees respectively. The User Steering Board conveys user requirements and feedback. The General Assembly consists of all partners involved in the development of the HELIX and is the ultimate decision-making body. Finally, the Advisory Board represents an external control structure, which supports and augments the decisions of the General Assembly.

Impact

HELIX will provide a competitive advantage to Greek researchers and SMEs, which are in the forefront of the data economy. This will ensure the inclusion of Greece in EU’s growth policies and Digital Agenda, assist in smart specialization activities, produce a new generation of data-trained researchers, introduce current and new SMEs in the data economy, propose and assist new digital economy models, achieve economies of scale in research activities, and also provide several spill-over effects regarding the overall financial growth in Greece. In addition, HELIX will assist in reducing the current fragmentation of national research effort by introducing policies and regimes for cross-domain research and collaboration. This is will be a result from the de facto sharing and reuse of research data, the provision of collaborative tools and services for researchers across domains and disciplines, in addition to specific Open Access policies served by HELIX as a result of EU-national policy initiatives.

Costs

The estimated start-up cost of HELIX is 1M, and the construction phase cost is 11.4M. Annual costs for operation are estimated at 1.8M, of which HR costs are 90%. The estimated additional revenue (funding/grants) to be attracted per year is 0.5M on average.