This document reports on the current status of \Acrshort{ESAP}, the \Acrlong{ESAP}.
\Acrshort{ESAP} is a key part of the interface between the services delivered by the \Acrshort{ESCAPE} project and the scientific community: it will provide a unified mechanism by which users can discover and interact with the data products, software tools, workflows, and services which are made available through \Acrshort{ESCAPE}, and it is designed to be extensible and flexible to adapt to the emergent requirements of future projects.
Development of \Acrshort{ESAP} is the fundamental activity of \Acrshort{ESCAPE}\Acrlong{WP5}.
\Acrshort{ESAP}, in and of itself, does not provide any compute or analysis capabilities.
Rather, it acts as a broker between users and the various services which are available to them.
For example, \Acrshort{ESAP} will help users identify datasets which are of interest to them (perhaps by interrogating the \Acrshort{ESCAPE} “data lake”, or an \Acrshort{ESFRI}-specific archive), to locate software and workflows which can help them analyze that data, and connect them to services which can execute analyses codes on their behalf (perhaps interactively, such as in a Jupyter notebook, or by scheduling jobs on a batch compute system).
\Acrshort{ESAP} abstracts the details of the various heterogeneous underlying systems from the user, so that they can use a unified, coherent interface to access all of the various services they need.
It does this by adopting a modular, flexible architecture.
The user will connect to a service-independent web-based \emph{user interface}, which in turn communicates with the \emph{\Acrshort{API} Gateway}.
By adopting a set of standard programming interfaces and conventions, the Gateway can easily be extended to address whatever current or future capabilities are exposed through the \Acrshort{EOSC}.
We have assessed the performance of \Acrshort{ESAP} by comparing both its current, prototype, implementation, and the ultimate design vision, against community needs and expectations.
These needs and expectations were derived in three ways:
\begin{itemize}
\item{from the initial requirements developed in the early stages of the \Acrshort{ESCAPE} project;}
\item{from the use cases that \Acrshort{ESCAPE}\Acrshort{ESFRI}s have been developing over the course of the project to date;}
\item{by hosting a workshop, at which \Acrshort{ESAP} was presented to the community and their feedback was solicited.}
\end{itemize}
Based on this evaluation, we conclude that \Acrshort{ESAP} is making good progress towards an ultimate vision which is well aligned with the needs of the scientific community.
No major changes to the \Acrshort{ESAP} plans are expected as a result of this analysis, but the feedback received will play an important role in improving and refining plans for further development of \Acrshort{ESAP} over the remaining project duration.
This document is submitted as \Acrshort{ESCAPE} project deliverable \docNumber{}, \emph{\docTitle{}}.
