The ERINA study is an initiative co-funded by the European Commission which aimed at identifying exploitation opportunities of e-Infrastructure in the domains of e-Health, e-Learning and e-Government.

e-Infrastructure is the new research environment in which all researchers - whether working in the context of their home institutions or in national or multinational scientific initiatives - have shared access to unique or distributed scientific facilities (including data, instruments, computing and communications), regardless of their type and location in the world.

The study looked into a number of case studies and analysed them in terms of the potential re-use for the results on distributed computing coming from the research environment in the three domains under study (of e-Health, e-Learning and e-Government).

ERINA has developed a methodology based on the comparison of costs and benefits before and after the deployment and use of ICT.

The indicators used in the ERINA methodology are related to:

• Economic efficiency
• Operational efficiency
• Accessibility
• Time saving
• Knowledge enhancement
• Environmental impact
• ICT infrastructure.

SEQUOIA and ERINA

SEQUOIA derives from the ERINA study the ERINA methodology, developed to analyse the diverse cases of RORI based on the comparison of costs and benefits before and after the deployment and use of specific information and communication technologies. SEQUOIA  takes advantage of the experience acquired in the ERINA study on the mechanism for monitoring and performing an impact assessment.

Visit the ERINA study website for more information.