Challenges of integrating large infrastructures using the example of ENES-CDI and EOSC

Climate Change is one of the most pressing global challenges in which researchers from around the world and from a wide range of disciplines are working together. This requires infrastructures that enable both local and cross-border cooperation.

Within IS-ENES, the Infrastructure for Earth System Modelling, European partners from the areas of climate modelling, computational science, data management, climate impacts and climate services are working together, to deliver a research infrastructures to provide access to climate model data and tools to boost the understanding of past, present and future climate variability and changes. Core element of the infrastructure is the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), which is operated in a global partnership.

In the Horizon Europe project FAIRCORE4EOSC, the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is involved in the design of further services in the European Open Science Cloud, that also meet the requirements of the IS-ENES community and is particularly dedicated to examining and testing the possibility of integrating EOSC and IS-ENES services.

FAIRCORE4EOSC focuses on the development and realization of further core components for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Leveraging existing technologies and services, the project will develop nine new EOSC-Core components aimed at improving the discoverability and interoperability of an increased amount of research outputs. In particular, IS-ENES checks this for selected data collections that have high scientific relevance for both data producers (the climate modellers) and data users from other research disciplines and will be available in the long term, such as those used for the IPCC reports,

These data collections and associated scientific entities (such as scientific projects) will be identified and will receive identifiers using Kernel Information Types as well as entries in the Data Type Registry with its corresponding contents. The consideration of the different aggregation levels, which is decisive for the re-use, is taken into account and a PID Graph will be utilized to enhance and simplify the re-use of data. Where appropriate, ‘Research Activity identifiers’ (RAiDs) will be assigned to projects and experiments, providing (domain agnostic) users with an aggregated view on the entities (data, software, people involved, etc.pp.) of the scientific project.

Crucial is the interlinking of service metadata with data collection metadata in the PID graph and EOSC research discovery graph to enable advanced discovery support for the ENES community. Additionally, the generated provenance records will be extended to include DOI and data citation info thus improving the reusability of derived data products in interdisciplinary research contexts. In the latter context, IS-ENES will use also the Metadata Crosswalk Registry (MSCR) to improve interoperable reuse of ENES data by impact communities through providing crosswalks from vocabularies for climate variables (e.g. the CF conventions) to ontologies understandable and interpretable by other communities.

This talk will provide an overview of the current status of the implementation and its long-term benefits for researchers in IS-ENES and beyond and will highlight some challenges related to the integration of various large infrastructures.