Towards a harmonized data ecosystem in Earth and Environment– a view on the Helmholtz Association’s Data Infrastructures

The interconnectivity of existing data infrastructures (DIS) across national and international initiatives (e.g. NFDI, EOSC and others) is an important goal to create a common interoperable data ecosystem. To achieve this, it is critical to harmonize the existing methods and concepts of research data collection, research data-reuse, among the DIS and along the FAIR principles.

Within the Helmholtz Association we maintain more than 50 data infrastructures in the field of Earth and Environment. Procedures of data handling, documentation and storage are hardly coordinated within Helmholtz, even less so within the larger community. To find out about the state of our infrastructures, the different approaches in data management procedures, technical capabilities, and concepts, we conducted a survey among all Helmholtz DIS. We asked questions related to their roles in the community, self-perception, quality control, curation, technology interfaces, data re-use and demands.

Based on this data we developed our vision to create a “Helmholtz data space”, unifying Earth and Environmental Centres and infrastructures and powering a new wave of large-scale, globally oriented, data driven research. The Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration’s (HMC) mission is, to federate (meta)data systems across Earth and Environment Centres and infrastructures throughout the Helmholtz Association, continuously aligning Helmholtz capacities to global norms and developments.