EOSC Federation Model

EOSC Federation

The architectural model adopted by EOSC for federating heterogeneous national, thematic, and pan-European research-data infrastructures into a single user-facing layer, with shared identity and access management, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk, and service onboarding.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 22 Aug 2026

Ask about EOSC Federation

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

The EOSC Federation is the operational architecture the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) uses to bring together heterogeneous national, thematic and pan-European research infrastructures into one user-facing environment, without EOSC itself owning that underlying infrastructure. Rather than building a single central platform, EOSC federates existing infrastructure “nodes,” each of which commits to a baseline of shared interoperability requirements — common authentication and authorisation (AAI), integration with EOSC’s core services, and FAIR-aligned registration of the services it contributes.

Core services and who participates

EOSC’s own documentation groups its core, federation-enabling services around identity and access management (AAI), a service catalogue, monitoring, a helpdesk, and persistent-identifier infrastructure — the shared plumbing that lets a researcher move between federated services with one identity rather than separate logins per provider. The e-Infrastructure Assembly — EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, OpenAIRE and PRACE — has historically formed the backbone of pan-European digital service provision that the Federation builds on, and national and thematic infrastructures have been progressively onboarded as “EOSC Nodes” (a second wave of candidate national and thematic Nodes was invited to enrol in 2026), spanning both national general-purpose infrastructures and thematic ones tied to specific research infrastructures.

How it differs from the EOSC Marketplace

The Federation is the governance and technical-interoperability model — the rules and shared infrastructure that let independently-operated Nodes function as one system. The EOSC Marketplace is the user-facing service catalogue and discovery interface built on top of that federation — where a researcher actually browses and requests services. Put simply: the Federation is what makes a consistent, browsable Marketplace possible across dozens of independently-run providers; the Marketplace is not itself the federation model, just its most visible product.

Worked example / counter-example

A national research-data infrastructure that integrates its authentication with EOSC AAI, registers its services in the EOSC service catalogue, and commits to the Federation’s baseline interoperability requirements becomes an EOSC Node under the Federation model. A standalone institutional repository with no EOSC AAI integration and no catalogue registration is not part of the EOSC Federation, however open or well-run it is on its own terms — and a commercial cloud platform is not, by itself, an EOSC Node merely because researchers happen to use it.

References

EOSC Association, EOSC Federation handbook and architectural documentation (eosc.eu).
European Commission, European Open Science Cloud strategy documentation.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="EOSC Federation"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/eosc-federation" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/eosc-federation",
  "name": "EOSC Federation",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/eosc-federation",
  "description": "The architectural model adopted by EOSC for federating heterogeneous national, thematic, and pan-European research-data infrastructures into a single user-facing layer, with shared identity and access management, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk, and service onboarding.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/eosc-federation",
  "sameAs": [
    "EOSC Federation model",
    "EOSC Node architecture"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-08-22T16:26:43",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}