Real-time applications (disaster warning and response, traffic flow control, weather monitoring and forecasting, etc.) are among the most challenging applications to develop, deploy and control on distributed infrastructure, but can be of great current and future value to research, industry and public safety/security. Applications that fuse real-time requirements with environmental science require the establishment of dedicated agile e-infrastructure that can provide fundamental storage and processing capacity that is able to respond effectively to time-critical events.

To address many of the real-time scientific challenges facing the research community and society at large today, it is necessary to be able to analyse and process large quantities of heterogeneous data acquired in several different scientific domains and at present distributed across many different kinds of existing ICT infrastructure. Interdisciplinary research (for example on the topic of climate change) requires substantial cross-domain knowledge and expertise, and the effective extraction of that knowledge and expertise for computational science requires new technical solutions for enhancing collaboration and for increasing interoperability between ICT services used within different research disciplines to perform their analyses. Of particular concern is how to manage real-time aspects of research (e-)infrastructure, including the management of large quantities of data being generated by sensor deployments in real-time, the fast orchestration of workflows on virtual infrastructure in response to real-time events (e.g. earthquakes) or in response to irregular demands on resources by researchers, and the search and aggregation of research data from multiple sources and catalogues on-demand. Solutions that make use of new developments in Cloud, virtual infrastructure, or software engineering tools and methodologies are particularly timely in this context.

The workshop for "interoperable infrastructures for interdisciplinary big data science (IT4RIs)" focuses on practical aspects of the design, development and operation of research e-infrastructure and virtual research environments, as well as the interaction between ICT infrastructure and user communities. This year, the workshop specifically highlights two important topics in those contexts: nearly real-time data processing and time-critical applications in Clouds. The workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers and developers to exchange their experiences and ideas on building nearly real-time data processing solutions, and models for programming, executing and controlling time-critical applications on virtualized infrastructures (e.g., Clouds).