Launch of the ILIAD project

Launch of the ILIAD project
In January 2022, the European Union allocated €17 million to the ILIAD consortium under the Horizon2020 program to develop and launch an innovative Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) that will provide highly accurate predictions of future developments at global seas. PSNC is one of the Partners in the project consortium

The ILIAD consortium, which includes 56 international partners, will develop virtual representations of the sea that will integrate and extend existing EU earth observing, modelling digital infrastructures and computing facilities to provide highly accurate predictions of future developments.

The ILIAD Project., which is comprised of 56 partners from 18 different countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, has been awarded the funding as part of the EU the €1 billion European Green Deal.

ILIAD – “INTEGRATED DigitaL Framework FOR Comprehensive MARITIME DATA AND INFORMATION SERVICES” will commercialise an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective model, capitalising the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, modern computing infrastructure including Internet of Things, social networking, Big Data, cloud computing and more.

The ILIAD consortium, which has received funding through the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, will combine high-resolution modelling with real-time sensing of ocean parameters, advanced algorithms for forecasting of spatio-temporal events and pattern recognition. The virtual representations will consist of several real-time to near-real-time digital replicas of the ocean.

ILIAD will also create a marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesised information and value-added services in combination with the ILIAD DTO.

The project partners include industrial companies, end users, academic institutions, research and technology developers and private firms.

“The development of innovative methods in open frameworks and platforms is needed to enable meaningful and informative model evaluations and comparisons for many large Earth science applications from weather to climate,” said Bente Lilja Bye, CEO of BLB and the Scientific Manager of ILIAD.

“The ambitious ILIAD project aims to build on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy to contribute towards a sustainable ocean economy.”

“Our aim is to assemble as broad and diverse as possible user community of existing and new users, who will use the project’s innovative technological solutions to address future challenges,” said Prof. Georgios Sylaios from the Democritus University of Thrace, who is the Operational Manager of ILIAD.

“By combining a large amount of diverse data in a semantically rich, and a data agnostic approach that allows simultaneous communication with real-world systems and models, we will enable researchers to develop what-if scenarios and analyse the impact of measures to prevent and adapt to climate change.”

Kostantinos Thivaios, INTRASOFT International is the coordinator of the project.
The project manager for PSNC is Raul Palma.

PSNC is responsible of the task related to the implementing the Ocean Interoperability Space, including the design and implementation of the Ocean Information Model (OIM) and Vocabulary. Additionally, PSNC contributes to other related tasks including, among others, the provision of semantically enhanced data discovery and datasets, the implementation of the Ocean Data Space and Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO), and the Digital Earth and Digital Twin APIs, as well as in the design and implementation of the Core Citizen science ILIAD ontology.

For more information https://ocean-twin.eu/