A User-Centric Software Infrastructure for Geoscience Data Using IPFS and FAIR Digital Objects

Climate and geoscience research increasingly relies on complex infrastructures and software to access, analyse, and reuse large and heterogeneous datasets. However, researchers often face fragmented data access, limited interoperability between platforms, and high entry barriers to cross-disciplinary data reuse. This conference contribution presents a user-centric infrastructure concept that combines the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) software with the FAIR Digital Objects (FDO) standard to address these challenges and support intuitive research workflows.

At the core of the approach is the representation of geoscientific datasets as FAIR Digital Objects that bundle data and metadata into persistent and interoperable entities. From a user perspective, FDOs provide identifiers and provenance information that enable consistent discovery, access, and reuse of data across platforms and disciplines. Within this framework, IPFS acts as infrastructure software, providing a robust, decentralized, peer-to-peer, content-addressable file-sharing system that ensures data integrity, redundancy, and long-term accessibility, while being abstracted behind user-facing interfaces and workflows.

This infrastructure concept is illustrated through a user-driven test case derived from the ORCESTRA (Organized Convection and EarthCARE Studies over the Tropical Atlantic) campaign. ORCESTRA integrates satellite observations, airborne measurements, ground-based instrumentation, and climate model simulations, reflecting a wide variety of data sizes and types. User stories obtained from the campaign, such as comparing data from multiple sources, guided the design of the infrastructure concept. A demonstration shows how selected datasets were ingested into IPFS and exposed through an FDO-compliant catalogue, enabling unified access and seamless reuse across tools and platforms.

The presented test case illustrates how a user-driven IPFS-based software approach, together with the multidisciplinary FDO metadata standard, can be operationalized to enhance transparency, reproducibility, and hence, sustainability in geoscience research. By supporting interoperable and machine-actionable research assets, this infrastructure concept contributes to a more robust and future-ready geoscience software ecosystem. Beyond geoscience, this approach is transferable to other domains facing similar challenges in data-intensive, multi-instrument, and multi-model environments.