Provision of access to the following infrastructures:

Name of the infrastructures and Installations: EPOS VO-TCS
Locations of the infrastructures: Virtual Access Services will be redundant using a load balanced system connection between INGV and IMO data Centres. Candidate locations are Catania (Sicily) and Reykjavik (Iceland) sites.
Web site address: To be developed
Annual operating costs (excl. investment costs) of the infrastructures (€): 500.000.

Description of the infrastructure: The EPOS ‘Volcano Observations’ Thematic Core Service (VO-TCS) infrastructure will give access to data/services produced by the EPOS volcanological community. The infrastructure uses the experience gained in the volcanological observatories and research institutions involved in VO-TCS and that achieved in the recent EU Supersite projects (FUTUREVOLC and MED-SUV).
The synergies between the existing infrastructures will allow reaching these goals: 

• Give access to data, data products and services existing in the EPOS VO-TCS gateway;
• implement data and services developed in the frame of the NA (Networking Activities) and JR (Joint Research) architecture inside EUROVOLC networks.

The focus of the Virtual Access is to uniform the complexity of the TCS data discovery and access through communication networks. Basically, EUROVOLC will take skills from the implementation of a user friendly flexible Smart Portal that is the EPOS VO- TCS gateway. In details, the back-end part of the system will be efficient and robust and strictly connected to the EPOS Integrated Core Service (ICS), while the front end will run applications on PCs and mobile devices (tablet, smartphone etc.) as result from different JRs products. Indeed, all information coming from different data providers will be available. It is remarkable that data from active volcanoes have a highly heterogeneous nature (seismic, geodetic, geochemical, volcanological, etc.), so datasets will be represented by metadata in the most used standards. During the EUROVOLC operative phase, data in the gateway will be validated and/or updated by each data provider.