Data management services for earth and climate communities

In all scientific domains, there is a growing production of data from different sources which can be hard to replicate. To be scientifically valuable those data have to be preserved, accessed, and shared across researchers and communities following the FAIR principles. 

EUDAT’s vision is that data should be shared and preserved across borders and disciplines and its mission is to enable data stewardship within and between European research communities through the Collaborative Data Infrastructure. To meet this vision, EUDAT offers a set of services for managing data. EUDAT is the largest pan-European data infrastructure and is conceived as a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, combining the richness of numerous community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe’s largest scientific data and computing centres. Covering both access and deposit, from informal data sharing to long-term archiving, and addressing identification, discoverability and computability of both long-tail and big data, EUDAT services aim to address the full lifecycle of research data.

The services offered by EUDAT are designed to be generic and to support  researchers from a variety of scientific domains at the different stages of the Data Life Cycle. These include the exchange of data with team members via B2DROP, publishing of datasets with the assignment of DOIs via B2SHARE, the long term preservation of data with replication across sites via B2SAFE, the persistent identification of the datasets with B2HANDLE and the discovery of datasets with B2FIND. Over the years, different earth and environmental sciences use cases (for example from SeaDataNet, TOAR, EPOS, ENES) have been integrating EUDAT services as major components of their scientific workflows. 

As an example we can mention the work done in collaboration with ICOS Carbon Portal which aimed to extend the community platform into a benchmarking environment that controls the whole processing chain from selection and preparing the prior information datasets, running the models, followed by the benchmarking and analysis of the results. In order to achieve this EUDAT data services have been integrated in the ICOS workflow: B2SAFE for storing the data and staging them for analysis at computing platforms, data are assigned with persistent identifiers via the B2HANDLE service, and B2FIND harvests the ICOS Carbon portal for broader sharing of the data. The use case addresses all aspects from Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reproducibility principles, with a focus on reproducibility.

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the EUDAT services suite and how the services can be integrated by the climate and earth science communities with the support of examples from current use cases. We will discuss with the participants to understand possible gaps in the service offering.