Exploiting and developing interoperability between multidisciplinary environmental research infrastructures in Europe – step toward international collaboration

Abstract:

Environmental Research infrastructures are long-term facilities, resources, and related services that are used by research communities to conduct environmental research in their respective fields. The focus of the European environmental Research Infrastructures is in in-situ or short-range remote sensing infrastructures.

Each environmental research infrastructure (RI) has its own particular set of science questions and foci that it must solve to achieve its objectives; however every RI is also providing its data and services to the wider user communities and thus contributing to the wider, trans- and interdisciplinary science questions and grand environmental challenges. Thus, there are many issues that most of the RIs share, e.g. data collection, preservation, quality control, integration and availability, as well as providing the computational capability to researchers.

ENVRI – Common operation of European Research Infrastructures – project was a collaborative action of major European Environmental RIs working towards increased cooperation and interoperability between the infrastructures (www.envri.eu). From the technological point-of-view, one of the major results is the development of common Environmental RIs Reference Model, which is a tool to effectively enhance the interoperability among RIs.

In addition to common technical solutions, also cultural and human related topics need to be tackled in parallel with the technical solutions. Topics such as open access, data policy issues (licenses, citation agreements, IPR agreements), technologies for machine-machine interaction, workflows, metadata, data annotations, and the training of the data scientist and research generalist to make it all work and implemented.

These three interdependent resource capitals (technological incl. ENVRI Reference Model, cultural and human capitals) will be discussed in the presentation.