Project partners
The Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC)
The STFC is a UK public sector organization whose role is to provide access to large scale scientific facilities for researchers in the UK. This is done both by providing facilities ourselves (e.g. ISIS Pulsed Neutron & Muon Source, Central Laser Facility, HPCx supercomputer, Chilbolton Observatory, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, United Kingdom Infrared Telescope), and by negotiating access to international facilities (e.g. CERN, Diamond Synchrotron Light Source, ESA, ESO, ESRF, ILL).
The researchers who use these facilities require an advanced IT infrastructure to support them including massive data storage (6 Petabyte data store), high end supercomputing, vast network bandwidth, and interoperability with the IT infrastructure of the UK researchers & the international facilities. To meet its immediate requirements, the STFC operates several services including the UK National Grid Service. To meet the medium to long term requirements, the STFC operates a collaborative IT research programme at UK, European and international levels and works with commercial providers to ensure that our IT needs can be met. STFC is also active in IT standardization (e.g. BSI, OGF, W3C, IETF, ISO) to ensure that our requirements are met by multiple interoperable suppliers.
STFC has an annual expenditure of about £500 million, and about 2500 staff based at seven locations. STFC includes activities provided by CCLRC and PPARC before April 2007 and SERC before April 1994. At the research level, CCLRC was a member of many Esprit and IST projects from FP2 to FP6 in areas including semantics & knowledge management (MMI2, MIPS, Limber, SWAD), web services/grid security (CoreGrid, GRASP, Akogrimo, TrustCoM, GridTrust) and the international production infrastructure grid EGEE I & EGEE II.
Contribution with the Consequence project:
STFC has three roles in the project based on their skills and experience:
1) Research activities into the legal basis, and terminology of data sharing agreements and the mapping from natural language into the policy language used in the technology for analysis, dissemination and enforcement of policies (WP2-4).
2) Providing a testbed for the technology developed in the project in the facilities provided by the STFC to researchers (WP6).
3) Leading the dissemination and exploitation activities. STFC have considerable experience of dissemination of the activities and results of Esprit, and IST projects in the past to ensure that the project will have an impact on ICT generally. Since STFC is not a product developer or marketer, the leadership of exploitation activities will be lead by STFC as a customer. STFC will provide leadership for exploitation, but the main effort to be contributed to the activity will come from the commercial partners (WP7).
For more details visit www.scitech.ac.uk
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