Scitags: A Standardized Framework for Traffic Identification and Network Visibility in Data-Intensive Research Infrastructures

The High-Energy Physics (HEP) and Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) communities have faced significant challenges in understanding their global network flows across the world’s research and education (R&E) networks. This article describes an update on the status of the work carried out to tackle this challenge by the Scientific Network Tags (Scitags) initiative, including the evolving framework and tools, as well as our plans to improve network visibility before the next WLCG Network Data Challenge in 2026. The Scitags initiative is a long-term effort to improve the visibility and management of network traffic for data-intensive sciences. It has created a set of tools, standards, and proof-of-concept demonstrators that show the feasibility of identifying the owner (community) and purpose (activity) of network traffic anywhere in the network.