Imagine you have a wonderful and ancient butterfly collection that you would like to catalogue and digitalize. And in such a way that other scientists have added value from it. What additional considerations would you need, apart from the technical requirements? What’s the right way to describe your collection, so that not only specialists can find the data, but also an engineer, looking for inspiration for new aerodynamic concepts or an artist, looking for specific, natural colours, patterns or shapes.

Working together with specialists from your own research field is easy – you think in the same way, use the same language, the same vocabulary. It's the same in every discipline, in every field of research, and it's the interdisciplinarity that is the challenge. In Earth System Science the number of disciplines is huge, as is the number of well known community standards, controlled vocabularies, ontologies … without the translation (mapping) from one discipline to another, without some help/tool to collect and find such terminologies – it’s chaos.

In this course we want to analyze together the gaps that arise in your daily research activities due to interdisciplinary work and projects. What are the misunderstandings, the data misinterpretations you are facing? In an interactive process you will learn more about a solution to bring order to the chaos - terminologies and the services around them. The aim is to make it easier for you to produce and/or understand reusable data in the future. FAIR is more than a buzzword - let's bring it to life!