Enhancing Open EO Knowledge preservation through the integration of the GEO Knowledge Hub and Zenodo

Reusable and actionable Earth Observation (EO) Data and Knowledge are crucial for tackling global issues. In recent years, the adoption of Open Science practices in the scientific community has increased the availability of Open EO Data and Open EO Knowledge. This movement created an ecosystem in which existing research outcomes, tools, data, and knowledge are reused as the basis for new research activities and projects. 

The Group on Earth Observation (GEO) is a global effort of countries, civil society organizations, and the private sector to empower users to access and use EO Data and Knowledge as the foundation for policymaking toward a more sustainable and resilient world. Over the past years, as one way to support its goal, GEO has been developing the GEO Infrastructure, a comprehensive set of services supporting the Open Data and Open Knowledge activities within the GEO Community. This infrastructure includes the GEOSS Platform, which provides an easy way to access Open EO Data from multiple sources. It also has the GEO Knowledge Hub (GKH), a digital repository empowering user to share and preserve Open EO Knowledge. 

 The GKH uses the Knowledge Package as its sharing unit, which is an implementation of a Research Compendium that allows users to centralize, preserve, and describe resources used to compose their research. Each resource in a Knowledge Package can have its metadata, files, and Digital Object Identifier (DOI). As the goal of the GKH is to preserve and centralize Open EO Knowledge, creating a Knowledge Package and uploading resources to it is always recommended. However, the resources used to develop research are sometimes spread across multiple platforms. In alignment with the GEO Data Sharing and Data Management Principles, the GKH also handles this case by allowing users to provide as much metadata as possible about resources and links to access it. 

Zenodo, the universal repository on which various research projects and other initiatives are based, is a common source for those remote resources. Therefore, we developed this integration in this work to facilitate the composition of Knowledge Packages using resources in Zenodo.  

This integration allows users to import a Zenodo record, such as a Dataset, as part of their Knowledge Package. Once imported, the record is visible within the package with its own page, presenting the metadata and files from Zenodo. To avoid duplications and optimize storage usage, GKH only imports metadata from Zenodo. The files are listed in GKH as remote content. Also, the Zenodo metadata in GKH is automatically synchronized when new updates are available in Zenodo. 

To test this integration, we partnered with EuroGEO, a European initiative to create a regional GEO community for Europe. We used this integration in various EU-funded projects, creating packages with a mix of content available in GKH and Zenodo. 

In this session, we are going to share our path to this integration, lessons learned, and the impact in the GEO community.