The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2017 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan from 5-10 March 2017, with co-located events and workshops. The main theme of ISGC 2017 is “Global Challenges: From Open Data to Open Science”.

The unprecedented progress in ICT has transformed the way education is conducted and research is carried out. The emerging global e-Infrastructure, championed by global science communities such as High Energy Physics, Astronomy, and Bio-medicine, must permeate into other sciences. Many areas, such as climate change, disaster mitigation, and human sustainability and well-being, represent global challenges where collaboration over e-Infrastructure will presumably help resolve the common problems of the people who are impacted. Access to global e-Infrastructure helps also the less globally organized, long-tail sciences, with their own collaboration challenges.

Open data are not only a political phenomenon serving government transparency; they also create an opportunity to eliminate access barriers to all scientific data, specifically data from global sciences and regional data that concern natural phenomena and people. In this regard, the purpose of open data is to improve sciences, accelerating specifically those that may benefit people. Nevertheless, to eliminate barriers to open data is itself a daunting task and the barriers to individuals, institutions and big collaborations are manifold.

Open science is a step beyond open data, where the tools and understanding of scientific data must be made available to whoever is interested to participate in such scientific research. The promotion of open science may change the academic tradition practiced over the past few hundred years. This change of dynamics may contribute to the resolution of common challenges of human sustainability where the current pace of scientific progress is not sufficiently fast. 

ISGC 2017 created a face-to-face venue where individual communities and national representatives can present and share their contributions to the global puzzle and contribute thus to the solution of global challenges.

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