Trani, Luca

Integrated use of multidisciplinary data is nowadays a recognized trend in scientific research, in particular in the domain of solid Earth science where the understanding of a physical process is improved and made complete by different types of measurements – for instance, ground acceleration, SAR imaging, crustal deformation – describing a physical phenomenon. FAIR principles are recognized as a means to foster data integration by providing a common set of criteria for building data stewardship systems for Open Science. However, the implementation of FAIR principles raises issues along dimensions like governance and legal beyond, of course, the technical one. In the latter, in particular, the development of FAIR data provision systems is often delegated to Research Infrastructures or data providers, with support in terms of metrics and best practices offered by cluster projects or dedicated initiatives. In the current work, we describe the approach to FAIR data management in the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), a distributed research infrastructure in the solid Earth science domain that includes more than 250 individual research infrastructures across 25 countries in Europe. We focus in particular on the technical aspects, but including also governance, policies and organizational elements, by describing the architecture of the EPOS delivery framework both from the organizational and technical point of view and by outlining the key principles used in the technical design. We describe how a combination of approaches, namely rich metadata and service-based systems design, are required to achieve data integration. We show the system architecture and the basic features of the EPOS data portal, that integrates data from more than 220 services in a FAIR way. The construction of such a portal was driven by the EPOS FAIR data management approach, that by defining a clear roadmap for compliance with the FAIR principles, produced a number of best practices and technical approaches for complying with the FAIR principles. Such a work, that spans over a decade but concentrates the key efforts in the last 5 years with the EPOS Implementation Phase project and the establishment of EPOS-ERIC, was carried out in synergy with other EU initiatives dealing with FAIR data. On the basis of the EPOS experience, future directions are outlined, emphasizing the need to provide i) FAIR reference architectures that can ease data practitioners and engineers from the domain communities to adopt FAIR principles and build FAIR data systems; ii) a FAIR data management framework addressing FAIR through the entire data lifecycle, including reproducibility and provenance; and iii) the extension of the FAIR principles to policies and governance dimensions. .

Metadata application profiles are widely employed to enable the exchange of metadata between different systems or platforms. DCAT-AP is an application profile of the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) used as a cross-domain and cross-platform metadata interchange format for data catalogues operated in the European Union. Several extensions of DCAT-AP have been created to address domain-specific requirements. Due to the inherent evolving nature of Research Infrastructures, maintenance and regular updates of such profiles are necessary activities in order to assess the matching with existing and new community requirements. In this paper, we give an overview of the new release of the EPOS-DCAT Application Profile based on DCAT-AP v2.1.0. EPOS-DCAT-AP has been developed, maintained, and adopted by the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Research Infrastructure to capture the heterogeneity of the assets provided by diverse scientific communities and to increase findability, accessibility, and usability of multidisciplinary data. EPOS-DCAT-AP is the result of a collaborative ongoing effort of various expertise. This application profile addresses several requirements, and it is suitable for a wide range of applications therefore it can be adopted by other Research Infrastructures.

Science benefits tremendously from mutual exchanges of information and pooling of effort and resources. The combination of different skills and diverse knowledge is a powerful capacity, source of new intuitions and creative insights. Therefore multidisciplinary approaches can be a great opportunity to explore novel scientific horizons. Collaboration is not only an opportunity, it is essential when tackling today’s global challenges by exploiting our fast growing wealth of data. In this paper we introduce the concept of Information-Powered Collaborations (IPC) — an abstraction that captures those requirements and opportunities. We propose a conceptual framework that partitions the inherent complexity of such dynamic environments and offers concrete tools and methods to thrive in the data revolution era. Such a framework promotes and enables information sharing from multiple heterogeneous sources that are independently managed. We present the results of assessing our approach as an IPC for solid-Earth sciences: the European Plate Observing System (EPOS).

The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) has been recently introduced as a W3C recommendation to define constraints for validating RDF graphs. In this paper a novel SHACL-driven multi-view editor is presented: SHAPEness. It empowers users by offering them a rich interface for assessing and improving the quality of metadata represented as RDF graphs. SHAPEness has been developed and tested in the framework of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS). In this context, the SHAPEness features have proven to be a valuable solution to easily create and maintain valid graphs according to the EPOS data model. The SHACL-driven approach underpinning SHAPEness, makes this tool suitable for a broad range of domains, or use cases, which structure their knowledge by means of SHACL constraints.