Paciello, Rossana

Data management is a key activity when Open Data stewardship through services complying with the FAIR principles is required, as it happens in many National and European initiatives. Existing guidelines and tools facilitate the drafting of Data Management Plans by focusing on a set of common parameters or questions. In this paper we describe how data management is carried out in EPOS, the European Research Infrastructure for providing access to integrated data and services in the solid Earth domain. EPOS relies on a federated model and is committed to remain operational in the long term. In EPOS, five key dimensions were identified for the Federated Data Management, namely the management of: thematic data; e-infrastructure for data integration; community of data providers committed to data provision processes; sustainability; and policies. On the basis of the EPOS experience, which is to some extent applicable to other research infrastructures, we propose additional components that may extend the EU Horizon 2020 Data Management Guidelines template, thus comprehensively addressing the Federated Data Management in the context of distributed Research Infrastructures.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a long-term initiative aimed at integrating research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe. EPOS provides a sustainable, multidisciplinary user-oriented platform - the EPOS Data Portal - that facilitates data integration, access, use, and re-use, while adhering to the FAIR principles. The paper describes the key governance, community building, and technical aspects for achieving multidisciplinary data integration through the portal. It also outlines the key portal features for aggregating approximately 250 data sources from more than ten different scientific communities. The main architectural concepts underpinning the portal, namely the rich-metadata, the service-driven data provision, and the usage of semantics, are outlined. The paper discusses the challenges encountered during the creation of the portal, describes the community engagement process, and highlights the benefits to the scientific community and society. Future work includes expanding portal functionalities to include data analysis, processing, and visualization and releasing the portal as an open-source software package.

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.

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.

The ability to use data produced by different sources (social networks, governments, weather sensors etc.) is widely recognized as a key to capitalize the value of data. In the scientific field, such usage may incredibly boost the innovation and foster new discoveries. However, one of the main hurdles is currently represented by the difficulties in achieving the required interoperability to provide integrated access to multi-disciplinary data. The current work presents a metadata-driven approach that uses in a combined way metadata, semantics, and services as key components for providing integrated access to heterogeneous data sources. The integration occurs within a central data integration system, which is driven by a rich metadata catalogue and that can present the data provided by the different data sources in a harmonised way to the end user, by means of RESTful APIs. A real application demonstrating metadata-driven semantic and service interoperability for achieving homogeneous access to multi-disciplinary heterogeneous data sources is illustrated in the case of EPOS, a Research Infrastructure for Solid Earth Science. The advantages in terms of ease of maintenance, of flexibility in plugging different standard without perturbating communities’ long-lasting technical practices, and of ability to track provenance are discussed. Future work for providing open-source implementation of a system built following the proposed approach is also envisaged.

Research Infrastructures (RI) of the Environment Domain as defined by ESFRI cover the main four subdomains of the complex Earth system (Atmosphere, Marine, Solid Earth, and Biodiversity/Terrestrial Ecosystems), thus forming the cluster of European Environmental and Earth System Research Infrastructures (ENVRIs). The overarching goal is that at the end of the proposed project, all participating RIs have built a set of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data services which enhances the efficiency and productivity of researchers, supports innovation, enables data- and knowledge-based decisions and connects the ENVRI Cluster to the European Open Science Cloud. The focus of the proposed work is on the provision of an environmental metadata catalogue describing in detail the FAIR services produced (or enhanced) in each subdomain; the complete set of thematic data services and tools provided by the ENVRI cluster can then be exposed to the EOSC catalogue of services.

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. .

FAIR principles have become reference criteria for promoting and evaluating openness of scientific data and for improving datasets Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. This also applies to Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the solid Earth domain committed to provide access to seismological data, ground deformations inferred from terrestrial, and satellite observations, geological maps, and laboratory experiments. Such RIs have been indeed committed for a long time, well before the appearance of FAIR principles, to engage scientific communities involved in data collection, standardization, and quality control as well as in implementing metadata and services for qualification, storage and accessibility. By addressing open science and managing scientific data, they are working to adopt FAIR principles, thus having the onerous task of turning these principles into practices. In this work we argue that although FAIR principles have the merit of creating a common background of knowledge to engage communities in providing data in a standard way thus easing interoperability and data sharing, in order to make the adoption of FAIR principles less onerous there is an urgent need of clear models, reference architectures and technical guidelines which can support RI implementers in the realization of FAIR data provision systems. We therefore discuss the state of the art of FAIR principles ecosystem and open new perspectives by discussing a four-stages roadmap that reorganizes FAIR principles in a way that better fits to the approach of RI implementers, and a FAIR adoption process that relates FAIR principles to technologies for their implementation.

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).