Evolution of the EPOS Platform Open Source

The development of sustainable and reusable scientific software infrastructures remains a significant challenge in geosciences, particularly when transitioning from single-purpose systems to platforms intended for broader community adoption. This presentation shares experiences and lessons learned from developing the EPOS Platform as an open-source, reusable data integration and visualization system, demonstrating how intentional architectural decisions and tooling investments can transform research infrastructure software into widely adoptable solutions.

The EPOS Platform (European Plate Observing System) initially served as the technical backbone for EPOS ERIC (https://www.epos-eu.org/epos-eric), providing integrated access to solid Earth science data across ten thematic domains. Built on a choreography architecture using Docker and Kubernetes, the system successfully fulfilled its original mandate. However, as other research infrastructures expressed interest in similar capabilities, we recognized the potential for broader impact and initiated a strategic shift toward creating a genuinely reusable open-source platform.

The transition required addressing fundamental challenges in software reusability. Initially, deployment necessitated manual configuration and deep infrastructure knowledge, creating significant adoption barriers. To overcome this, we developed the epos-opensource CLI tool (https://github.com/EPOS-ERIC/epos-opensource), a command-line interface with an integrated terminal user interface (TUI) that reduces deployment from a complex manual process to a single command. This tool enables researchers and developers to deploy fully functional instances locally using either Docker Compose or Kubernetes, significantly accelerating both external adoption and internal development workflows.

We released the complete platform under GPL v3 license, ensuring that all code, including that powering the production EPOS Platform (https://www.ics-c.epos-eu.org/), remains open and community-accessible. Within EPOS ERIC, the open-source release and deployment tooling facilitate rapid provisioning of testing environments for developers and metadata contributors. Comprehensive documentation was developed using Docusaurus, following standard open-source practices to provide installation guides, system architecture references, and user tutorials. The EPOS Platform Open Source has been leveraged to enhance data sharing by multiple research initiatives, including ENVRI-Hub NEXT (https://envri.eu/envri-hub-next/), DT-GEO (https://dtgeo.eu/), IPSES (https://www.ipses-ri.it), and Geo-INQUIRE (https://www.geo-inquire.eu/), demonstrating the platform's versatility across different research contexts.

Our experience demonstrates that developing reusable scientific software requires deliberate investment beyond initial functionality. Key factors include comprehensive documentation following community standards, simplified deployment through user-friendly tooling, architectural flexibility for diverse use cases, and genuine open-source practices where production and community code remain unified. These principles, while resource-intensive, are essential for scientific software to achieve meaningful impact and contribute to a more sustainable, collaborative research infrastructure ecosystem.

This presentation will explore the evolution of the EPOS Platform Open Source, demonstrating how strategic investments in deployment tooling, comprehensive documentation, and architectural flexibility enabled the transformation from a single-purpose infrastructure to a widely adoptable community resource.