User Scenarios in Action: how European Open Science Cloud services can help Earth System Scientists

Researchers from around the world and across various disciplines are collaborating to address climate change, one of the most pressing global challenges. Producing, processing and handling huge data collections is an everyday challenge for Earth System scientists and data managers alike. Within the Horizon Europe project FAIRCORE4EOSC, we examine several newly developed FAIR enhancing services in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to address some of these data challenges in the ‘Climate Change’ case study. The overall goal is to assess how to improve the discoverability, reusability and traceability of climate data collections at several levels of granularity, thus enhancing the FAIRness of the ENES ( European Network for Earth System Modelling) Research Infrastructure data. The case study explores how to link provenance metadata, processing steps applied to the data, citation information as well as information about connected research activities to the data itself.

The ‘Climate Change’ case study investigates the benefits of integrating the following FAIRCORE4EOSC services: RAiD (Research Activity Identifier Service), PIDGraph and DTR (Data Type Registry). 

RAiDs are exemplarily used to provide an exhaustive research context for existing data collections, helping domain agnostic users with an aggregated view on related details - from data generation by the Earth System modellers up to publication of final assessment reports. RAiD metadata will be supplied to Open Science Graphs like the PIDGraph. The DTR offers the possibility to register and assign persistent identifiers to single and complex data types and achieves a machine-actionable standardization of type metadata that is used for some typical climate data objects. This is a prerequisite for machine-aided analytics and is of high priority due to the commonly large data volumes in climate science.

Additional efforts aim to level the pass to future developments, such as potentially extending existing Web Processing Services (WPS) to be able to publish RAiD details. To advance further, we propose using the DTR for data typing of STAC (SpatioTemporal Assets Catalogs) defined as FDOs (FAIR Digital Objects), paving the way for enhanced interoperability across data spaces in climate science. 

Our presentation will demonstrate the practical benefits of these new EOSC services for a climate research ecosystem paving the way for a more efficient, collaborative, and impactful Earth System Science community.