Final Report Summary - COOPEUS (Strengthening the cooperation between the US and the EU in the field of environmental research infrastructures)
Executive Summary:
Much more than any other organizational form, research infrastructures appear to be the natural choice for establishing sustainable links across geoscience disciplines. They are meant to serve the needs of their users and typically offer standard services including data variable in space and time. However, environmental research by its very nature is very diverse as it embraces quite different scientific disciplines and makes use of a variety of different observational methods. These circumstances result in the effect that data coming from different observing systems even in the same region cannot directly be used to form a holistic picture of the observed environment, as the technical requirements/conditions on the observed parameters often differ significantly. From that perspective integrating research infrastructures from different fields is posing an enormous challenge. However, if the integration process is not started now the situation is bound to become more complex in the coming years. Based on these insights, COOPEUS has been put on track to cross-link research infrastructures that reached a certain maturity level by integrating existing data and information systems, and finally facilitate a common understanding of basic architectures, services, and products as a base for facilitating data and information exchange.
At the current stage, the immediate benefits for individual scientists from cross-linking research infrastructures are often difficult to identify. In cross-cutting topics, for example; volcanic ashes changing the biochemistry of ocean waters which affects primary production are not prime topics of research, but lie more in the monitoring realm. In COOPEUS, the tool to demonstrate the benefits from cross-linking research infrastructures was the concept of user scenarios, which was used to stimulate discussions and assist in the process of highlighting the benefits. In COOPEUS, the user scenario on Tsunami detection systems was a prime example, which gave significant insights into the benefits of cross linking research infrastructures.
On the European and the international level, a number of initiatives have started to tackle the issue of cross-cutting scientific challenges in regards to improving the cross-disciplinary data sharing. For these initiatives to make significant progress, it is important that they build on existing knowledge and experience already available. The COOPEUS project has analyzed and described the international environmental research infrastructure landscape as it is today, and produced a roadmap for future collaborative initiatives in the field of environmental research infrastructures. This provides a guideline for the collaborative actions of the COOPEUS community, but is relevant for all environmental research infrastructure initiatives.
One major actor in the environmental research infrastructure landscape is GEOSS, and COOPEUS recognize GEOSS as the only truly global multidisciplinary platform for the integration of environmental data, although GEOSS may not always perfectly suit for the mission of the individual research infrastructures. COOPEUS explored the use of GEOSS common infrastructure as a platform for registering the resources of the individual research infrastructures in COOPEUS. This resulted a number of valuable practical as well as intellectual lessons, which was formulated in a close collaboration between COOPEUS and GEOSS.
COOPEUS has also initiated collaborations with other initiatives such as the Belmont Forum E-Infrastructure initiative, and EarthCube in the US that aims at greatly increasing the productivity and capability of researchers working at the frontiers of Earth system science. Furthermore, the COOPEUS project received significant attention and guidance from funding agencies, and as a result many of the actions started under COOPEUS will survive beyond the lifetime of the project implemented in new initiatives. For example is the development of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and the further development of the concept of user scenarios displayed as one of the key recommendations in the Belmont forum e-infrastructure final report, which demonstrates the impact that COOPEUS had in this domain.
Project Context and Objectives:
The road to COOPEUS
The idea of strengthening the interaction between research infrastructures in the field of environmental science was born out of a discussion between the European Commission and the National Science Foundation. EC and NSF have decided to support European and US cooperation projects addressing interoperability of environmental research infrastructures across the Atlantic. As a concrete action, a workshop had been organized in September 2011 in Brussels where all relevant stakeholders from both sides of the Atlantic were invited to present their views and ideas. The objective of this workshop was to identify actions for a better integration (both thematic and cross-cutting) of existing Research Infrastructure initiatives in the US and EU. The integration should encompass the coordination of scientific themes as well as facilitating better interoperability of the technical infrastructures, and thereby lay the foundation for a truly global observation system of systems. More specifically, the EC had already concrete plans for implementing these objectives by publishing a call for projects that should develop EU/US common data policies and data standards in the field of environmental research, in particular related to space weather facilities, atmospheric observatories, ocean observatories, tectonics-related observatories, facilities for research on biodiversity and ecosystems. The project should assist in the creation of a long-term sustainable framework (i.e. addressing the full life cycle of data) for the coordination of actions at global level, as well as address interoperability (including compliance with GEOSS principles), harmonization of data formats, data validation and curation.
The COOPEUS objectives
As a consequence of these considerations, the COOPEUS project was developed following the basic idea of focusing on data sharing addressing all related technical requirements in regard to data interoperability. Although the objectives of the project can be phrased in a simple way, the implementation proofed to be quite complex. Therefore, a project structure had to be defined in a way that took the needs of the research infrastructures as well as the idea of data sharing across different disciplines into account. The lifetime of the project was essentially split into two parts starting out by fostering interoperability across the Atlantic for the individual research infrastructures working in the same scientific domains. In the second phase, by introducing user scenarios, data sharing across disciplines should be facilitated.
What was not known during the proposal writing phase was to what extent the mission profiles of the involved research infrastructures actually match. The importance of that became clear during the course of the project as the mission statement of the individual research infrastructures have massive consequences for the data policies, i.e. the relationship to the scientific users and also for the technical implementation of the data infrastructure. It also trickles down to the level where data are generated and disseminated.
Another insight that evolved during the course of the project was the importance of describing the landscape that COOPEUS is acting in and defining its role. This was one of the early tasks that had been addressed by the consortium as all research infrastructures are operating as part of a bigger network meaning that they are also contributing to other programs. These will be explained in more detail in the following section on related initiatives.
Besides addressing interoperability COOPEUS has been striving to demonstrate interworkability meaning the use of processing tools across disciplines. One example of this idea was the engagement of IRIS that mainly deals with land based seismic measurements as part of the OOI ocean related data infrastructure. It offered the opportunity to learn about the methods that are used to analyze time series data.
Related environmental research infrastructure initiatives
Some information about related programs and initiatives shall be presented here, the full environmental research landscape analysis can be found in the COOPEUS road map report. The first and most important program is EarthCube, which consists of a number of projects that all addressed similar issues of data sharing and interoperability across disciplines as in COOPEUS. In some cases funding coming from EarthCube could be used synergistically for pursuing COOPEUS goals although most of the funding of our US partners came out of the NSF SAVI program (Science Across Virtual Institutes). The synchronization of funding was rather difficult to achieve and during the first year of COOPEUS there was no direct funding for our US partners available. At the moment the situation has reversed – the funding for COOPEUS stopped while the US still continues to receive funds. From the beginning of 2016, the COOPEUS mission in Europe will continue under the H2020-funded project COOP+, which was developed based on the experience and knowledge gathered in the COOPEUS project.
Furthermore, COOPEUS partners have engaged in an initiative by the Belmont Forum. Starting in October 2013, the Belmont Forum E-Infrastructures and Data Management Collaborative Research Action aimed at bringing together domain scientists, computer and information scientists, and other experts from more than 14 countries to establish recommendations on how the Belmont Forum can implement a more coordinated, holistic, and sustainable approach to the funding and support of global environmental change research. The coordinator of COOPEUS was engaged in this Belmont Forum initiative as member of the steering group and leading the work package on “Harmonization of Global Data Infrastructures for sharing environmental information”. Conclusions were drawn from a series of collaborative scoping activities conducted as part of an extensive 18-month international review on the state of global data management, networking, computing, legal issues and governance. The Belmont Forum e-infrastructure initiative has been seen as a natural follow-up to the work started in COOPEUS, and some of the COOPEUS ideas like the set-up of user scenarios had been taken up.
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is designed to build the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society. The Research Data Alliance works through focused Working Groups and Interest Groups, formed of experts from around the world – from academia, industry and government. It was started in 2013 by a core group of interested agencies – the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation. RDA was launched in March 2013. COOPEUS partners are involved with a number of working groups. As an example, the RDA working group on PIDs for time-series data was launched at a COOPEUS workshop on PIDs. In this way, some of the initiatives coming from COOPEUS will continue using the RDA as a platform.
The data integration task that COOPEUS was aiming for has a lot of overlaps with the goals of GEOSS. Therefore, it has been a natural decision to build up closer links in particular to the group that works on the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). A joint COOPEUS-GEOSS workshop was organized in 2014 with a participation of the GEO secretariat and members of the GCI group. The workshop highlighted the benefits for the RIs obtained by registering resources in the GCI. The workshop also provided significant insight into the need for specific development that the GCI must undergo in order to facilitate easy registration of resources and thereby be attractive to environmental research infrastructures.
A number of other collaborative research infrastructure projects have been running in parallel with COOPEUS. COOPEUS has worked closely with many of them; in particular ODIP, ENVRI, EUDAT and iCORDI.
COOPEUS research infrastructures and their outcome of COOPEUS
COOPEUS involved a very diverse group of environmental research infrastructures. The infrastructures were paired up based on the scientific disciplines they cover. In this way, each of the following disciplines; Space weather, Carbon observation, Ocean observation, Solid Earth observation and Biodiversity were represented by at least 2 Research infrastructures in COOPEUS; 1 from EU and 1 from USA. A short overview of the involved research infrastructures and their objectives is given here (based on the roadmap report):
EISCAT- AMISR (Space Weather)
Within this project EISCAT and the US partner AMISR have coordinated their collaboration in the field of observing incoherent scattering events. The goal was to establish a joint global user community with actions including education, data exploitation, technology planning and joint technical workshops, as well as coordinated observation programs. Starting from a joint set of data practices and from a joint roadmap the partners aimed to ultimately explore joint financing opportunities for future consortia, which would be responsible for new facilities which are part of the developing global RI.
ICOS- NEON (Carbon observation)
Both ICOS and NEON aim at observing carbon oxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere while NEON additionally is addressing biodiversity as well. Accordingly, a link to LifeWATCH exists as well. Because of the fragmentation of the measurement activities, the comparability of the data acquired in the two continents were questionable and resulted in an increased level of uncertainty in cross-continental analysis. This situation was partly mitigated by global initiatives such as WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch and FluxNet, where experts met and compared their data. The research infrastructures ICOS and NEON created more recently a new situation whereby data and metadata formats had been standardized, at least at the regional level (US, Europe). As part of COOPEUS these activities had been continued and definite agreements were achieved.
EPOS- IRIS and UNAVCO (Solid Earth Dynamics)
In the COOPEUS project the partners had deliberately been focusing on coordinating and developing the two most advanced RI’s elements, seismology and geodesy, creating the critical mass for a global advanced earth science IT architecture. In this context the EarthCube discussions, accompanied by very similar discussions within many different projects and initiatives within the EPOS community had been very timely.
EMSO- OOI (Ocean observation)
The transatlantic coordination on ocean observatory programs through COOPEUS has aimed at the seamless integration of existing observing systems into a common data framework to allow for an efficient and widespread use of the data and information on the world’s oceans. Right from the beginning it was clear that a Tsunami user scenario would be a good concept to pursue as it immediately lends itself to combing terrestrial and ocean based observations. This User-scenario was conducted under COOPEUS and gave valuable insight into the practical challenges associated with connecting research infrastructures to work on a specific and immediate challenge with great societal impact; in this case, the establishment of a Tsunami detection system.
LifeWATCH- DataONE and NEON (Biodiversity)
Within the biodiversity community in COOPEUS; a joint scientific agenda as a driver for common research infrastructure development was produced and implementation plans for data and related processing tools have been agreed upon. A roadmap and implementation plan towards common cross-Atlantic services from cooperating infrastructures in the area of biodiversity and ecosystem research was generated.
Project Results:
1 Foreword
Understanding and addressing the great environmental challenges of the world today relies on information on a very diverse set of data types from different scientific fields that range over ecosystem production, carbon budgets, biodiversity, geodesy and seismology, and ocean and atmospheric circulation. Cross-disciplinary discoverability, availability and accessibility to these kinds of data from all available sources are essential for basic research as well as providing understanding for societal benefit. In the past three years, the COOPEUS project has investigated ways to overcome impediments for data sharing and exchanges among environmental research infrastructures from very different scientific disciplines ranging from space weather over biodiversity to solid earth dynamics. In this work, COOPEUS have provided guidelines for a better integration of existing environmental research infrastructures.
The initial work of COOPEUS focused on identifying gaps and commonalities among COOPEUS-involved research infrastructures in their ways of making data available e.g. via internet accessible databases and data policies. The outcome of this analysis paved the way for the collaborative cross disciplinary work of the second period of COOPEUS, which has focused on identifying concrete actions to improve discoverability, availability and accessibility of data from COOPEUS RIs across scientific disciplines.
Cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work packages
The COOPEUS project brought together the scientists involved in Europe’s major environmental related research infrastructures or infrastructure projects, i.e. EISCAT, EPOS, LifeWATCH, EMSO, and ICOS, with their respective US counterparts that are responsible for the NSF-funded projects; AMISR, EARTHSCOPE, DataONE, OOI and NEON. The intention is that by interlinking these activities new synergies and best practices are generated between the RIs across the Atlantic. The work of COOPEUS can be divided into two categories; the interdisciplinary work and the Cross disciplinary work. Here we shall describe the S & T results/foregrounds of the individual workpackages 2-6 (interdisciplinary) focusing on the improvement of the transatlantic collaboration within a specific scientific discipline as well as workpackages 7 and 8 (Cross-disciplinary) supported by COOPEUS management WP1 focusing on improving transatlantic collaboration between environmental RIs across scientific disciplines.
2 Achievements summary:
2.1 Summary - Interdisciplinary work (WP2-WP6):
Work packages 2-6 (interdisciplinary) focused on the improvement of the transatlantic collaboration within specific scientific disciplines, namely; Space weather (WP2), Carbon Observations (WP3), Ocean Observations (WP4), Solid earth dynamics (WP5) and Biodiversity (WP6).
WP2 focussed on creating an efficient international environment for collaborative studies in the area of atmospheric radar studies. The main infrastructures involved in WP2 were EISCAT (EU) and AMISR (US). The main effort was initially made in two different areas: the coordination of observational programmes and the standardisation of data formats with the purpose to simplify interoperability between the different international incoherent scatter radar systems. These activities were finalised by the preparation of a roadmap for international collaborations in incoherent scatter radar operations. This roadmap has been presented to the incoherent scatter radar community and has been accepted as a good starting point for future collaborations.
WP3 focused on Carbon observations and improving the collaboration between key-research infrastructures involved with various kinds of carbon data. The main infrastructures involved in WP3 were ICOS (EU) and NEON (US)
The main achievements were:
• MoUs were signed over the course of the project between ICOS ATC and NOAA-GMD and between ICOS ETC and both NEON and LBNL for AmeriFlux
• Bringing together scientific leaders of carbon research on issues of interoperability and data policy harmonization for users as well as identifying data policy gaps.
• Identifying and prioritizing user-driven vs tech-driven expression of requirements focusing on user’s requirements such easy and open data access, no delays in data release and stability in formats.
• Bringing together current and future EU and US data users to better assess emerging needs for interoperability (ICOS-NEON Carbon training workshops)
• Training early career scientists to write common (EU-US) projects with common Data Management Plans
• RI processes harmonization: harmonizing common data processing chain and variables definition between ICOS and AmeriFlux.
• Providing a fertile ground for the emergence of international initiatives: GEO Carbon flagship, and the WMO initiative IG3IS
• Expansion of the harmonization and standardization concepts and agreements outside the cross-Atlantic domain, including for example Brazilian and Chinese ecosystem networks
WP4 focused on Oceans observations and improving the collaboration between key-research infrastructures involved with various kinds of ocean data. The main infrastructures involved in WP4 were EMSO (EU) and OOI (US). WP4 has explored the facilitation of a network of RIs that are engaged in designing specific science experiments and observational strategies for ocean observatories.
COOPEUS provided the framework for the establishment of a network of Ocean Observation Research Infrastructures under development across the North Atlantic. A main outcome of the project is the formation of a group of key experts from Europe and USA that have now matured strong contacts for a long-lasting collaboration and have set the foundation for expanding a structured relationship. Though COOPEUS was initially limited to EU-US partnerships, a Canadian team from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) was considered a valuable and natural additional partner in the collaboration. The Solid Earth expertise from the corresponding COOPEUS WPs participant institutions were included for the disciplinary sector of seismology and for the dissemination of ocean network seismological data to the wider community of seismologists.
The members of the trans-Atlantic team are:
EMSO: Laura Beranzoli, Mairi Best, Francesco Chierici, Davide Embriaco, Paolo Favali, John Picard, Massimiliano Rossi, Nevio Zitellini
OOI: Robert Weller, Nan Galbraith, Deborah Kelly, Oscar Scofield, Scott Glenn, John Delaney, John Orcutt
ONC: Martin Heesemann, Martin Scherwath, Benoit Pirenne, Tania Insua
IRIS: Tim Ahern
UNAVCO: Chuck Meertens
The experts’ network developed around consensus subjects
- Technological: seafloor seismological data flowing in real-time in monitoring and warning systems, harmonization of metadata catalogues across the RIs for data interoperability
- Scientific: real time joint analysis of bottom pressure and seismological data and use of GPS data jointly with pressure data to improve the reliability of early detection and recognition of tsunami waves.
Due to the novelty of these research infrastructures, and development in the comprehension of socially important natural processes, it is expected that these areas can hopefully benefit from a robust and comprehensive framework of best practices developed by the trans-atlantic collaboration founded in COOPEUS.
The User Scenario approach has been very fruitful, and was demonstrated to be appropriate to strengthen the link between counterpart RIs on both sides of the Atlantic. The selected user scenario ‘Tsunami dynamics and Early Warning Systems for Near Source Areas (Mediterranean, Juan de Fuca)’ was considered of interest with respect to the type of the natural risks threatening socio-economic developed and densely populated areas and given the maturity of knowledge and practice. The use case, directly involving components of the participating Research Infrastructures has been and will be a real work environment to make the collaboration grow based on sustained data/metadata sharing and interoperability.
Tangible outcomes of the success of the collaboration was the formation of a partnership including some of the institutions and main actors of COOPEUS and the ability to submit a new project proposal, namely COOP_Plus - Cooperation of Research Infrastructures to address global challenges in the environment field under the Call H2020-INFRASUPP-2014-2. The proposal was positively ranked and the announcement of funding approval by EC was communicated at the time of this report preparation. COOPEUS_Plus will expand the international collaboration to other world-class RIs and will delivered a roadmap for the collaborative activities.
WP5 coordinated the long-term integration plans for solid Earth science envisioned by EPOS (European Plate Observing System) in Europe and EarthScope in the US, ensuring interoperability through the frameworks recommended by GEO (SS). These long-term integration plans for solid Earth science infrastructures specifically aim at the interoperability of multidisciplinary data and computational research infrastructures through the development of standards and concepts for data discovery, information access and computational research environments.
The current, most advanced infrastructures within Earth sciences, seismology and geodesy, are continuously evolving towards a sustainable, global, interconnected infrastructure with the goals to efficiently explore distributed, big data archives and to provide novel services and computational frameworks to the research communities. Different on-going projects and initiatives within both EU and US are focussing on specific domains, geographical regions and specialized building blocks to be implemented in these infrastructures.
Global coordination requires a solid framework on a regional scale encompassing different disciplines. The US program EarthScope is a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that deploys thousands of seismic, GPS, and other geophysical instruments to study the structure and evolution of the North American continent and the processes the cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It involves collaboration between scientists, educators, policy makers, and the public to learn about and utilize exciting scientific discoveries as they are being made. The European EC H2020 program EPOS-IP is the long-term plan for the integration of national and transnational Research Infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe to provide seamless access to data, services and facilities. Continuous coordination on both regional scales (EU, US) and between EU and US project leaders, scientists and developers provided the framework for interoperability in services within and between, in particular, the seismological and geodetic domains. COOPEUS provided the framework to coordinate, plan and implement various activities and developments within EU-US Earth Science infrastructures, and to share visions within EPOS (EU) and EarthScope (US) on data and cyber infrastructures, to align infrastructures and ensure long term interoperability.
WP6 focused on Biodiversity and was concerned with finding new and effective approaches for the scientific community based on the use of data and services in the EU and US Research Infrastructures. The main infrastructures involved in WP6 were LifeWATCH (EU) and NEON (US). In summary, the two most important achievements within WP6 are the following:
• Establishing clear collaboration paths between NEON and LifeWatch
• Identification of global challenges showing the need for cooperation among environmental RI dealing with biodiversity data at global level
These achievements have already significantly impacted the way new challenges are addressed in LifeWatch, and the user-scenario on the global carbon and phenology data conducted by WP6 illustrated the the ingredients required to address a global challenge, considering the point of view of interoperability, need to contrast and compare different models, data formats and operational procedures. The user-scenario can be considered as an example of how to setup a collaboration process among different Research Infrastructures from EU and US, from an initial idea to the implementation of a real Case Study addressing a global challenge
2.2 Summary – Cross-disciplinary work (WP7-WP8 + WP1)
The cross disciplinary collaboration is an essential aspect of COOPEUS. WP8 and WP7 were specifically dedicated to explore the synergies achieved through an improved cross-disciplinary interaction among environmental RIs. WP8 and WP7 received direct input from WP2-6, and as such the work of the cross disciplinary work packages 7 and 8 represents the views of the entire COOPEUS community.
WP7’s main objective was to set the technological and formal basis to improve interoperability and data exchange between RIs. The work package successfully harmonized RI data policies and provided a joint COOPEUS data policy, which strongly promotes the spirit of open access to data compliant with the relevant legislative frameworks. Based on a status quo assessment, WP7 further identified a set of core integrative standards, which are suitable for a sustainable future cross-discipline and Atlantic cooperation and improve data discovery as well as data exchange among EU and US RIs.
Both, the joint data policy and the initial suite of core standards were used to set up a joint standardization framework which was further improved by a series of practical tools, which include the already existing services and registries of GEOSS as well as an interoperability maturity assessment online tool. MoU templates to specify international cooperation between RIs in detail as well as the ‘joint standardization handbook’ further contribute to the COOPEUS framework for international collaboration among EU and US RIs.
WP8 synthesised joint COOPEUS community strategies, set priorities, selected COOPEUS case studies and prepared future roadmap and action plans with COOPEUS partner research infrastructures.WP8 aimed to develop common strategies and a joint framework for long-term EU-US cooperation on data interoperability and on interworkability of methods between environmental research infrastructures.
The most important achievement of the WP8 was the establishment of the COOPEUS roadmap for the next 10 year among the COOPEUS partner RIs. The roadmap outlines a list of actions that the COOPEUS partners have identified as the needed steps towards better transatlantic data interoperability among COOPEUS observatories/research infrastructures. In addition, the roadmap drafting process was an important activity for enhancing the community building, defining the common strategic messages and outlining the main dissemination activities.
WP1; COOPEUS management (WP1) supplemented the cross-disciplinary activities. WP1 held 4 workshops with the overall goal of involving the broader environmental research infrastructure community in the work of COOPEUS, and thereby more broadly improve the awareness of the challenges the research infrastructure community faces in regards to data discoverability, data availability and data accessibility of environmental data. The most important workshop was a Hands-on Workshop about registering and accessing resources from COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). This workshop was held jointly together with GEOSS and a valuable feedback loop between the COOPEUS users of the GCI and GEOSS was established at this workshop to the benefit of GEOSS as well as COOPEUS RIs.
Furthermore, in order to engage interest in the benefit and challenges associated with improving collaboration among environmental RIs to an even larger community, COOPEUS was initiator of a special issue of the iLEAPS-newsletter on the environmental Research infrastructure landscape. COOPEUS was guest editor on the production, which presented more than 10 articles introducing the work of many of the Research infrastructures in COOPEUS, also including an article specifically on COOPEUS. Furthermore COOPEUS personnel were interviewed about their work for an interview article.
3 Detailed description of main S & T results/foregrounds
The following will give a detailed description of the S&T results in the individual COOPEUS WPs.
3.1 S & T results/foregrounds of interdisciplinary workpackages
3.1.1 WP2: Space Weather; EISCAT (EU) and AMISR (USA)
WP-Leader: EISCAT
The objective of the activities in this work package was to create a sustainable global working environment in the incoherent scatter radar (ISR) community. In particular, the main aims were to harmonise the ISR data formats, to coordinate ISR observation programmes and to construct a roadmap to organise future efforts of ISR facilities on both sides of the Atlantic.
EISCAT and the US ISR counterparts have agreed to work towards standardised formats for ISR data. The different data levels used in the ISR systems worldwide were identified in a gap analysis, where it was clearly shown that ISR systems produce vast amounts of raw data that can be stored and transferred at different levels of reduction, but also that similarities exist at the fundamental level of data organisation at the different ISR facilities. These similarities allow a high degree of standardisation to be made, which would facilitate increased scientific cooperation between users of the different systems. The data levels were classified as follows:
• Data level 1 (RF signal voltage) represents the lowest accessible level of digital sampled and filtered data in the radio frequency (RF) voltage domain. The formats and rates of these data are system-specific and usually also depend on experimental configurations. These data are normally not stored except for some specialised applications where this level of data is required. Future systems, like EISCAT_3D, will perform much of their fundamental processing, such as beam-forming, digitally on level 1 data instead of in the analog receiver chains as is done in present systems.
• Data level 2 (correlated products) consists of correlated products produced by signal chain elements applying auto- and cross-correlation operations on level 1 data. Data of this level have traditionally been used for long-term storage by most current incoherent scatter radar systems.
• Data level 3 (plasma parameters) consist of the physical parameters describing the ionosphere that are derived from the level 2 data. Data of this level are by far the most requested data.
Since the level 1 data formats are system dependent to a very high degree and not normally subject to long-term storage, there has not yet been a need for any inter-system harmonisation at this data level. However, it was noted during Task 2.3 (EC/USA cooperation on incoherent data practices and formats) that it is useful for the development of new measurement and data analysis techniques to have the possibility to exchange level 1 data between different operators and systems. The HDF5 experience of AMISR and Millstone Hill has been identified as a starting point for discussions aimed at defining a common RF voltage format across the community.
Data level 2 has been the most common level for long time storage of incoherent scatter radar data, because at that level the data volume has been sufficiently reduced by the correlation to be manageable while it still retains sufficient information for further analysis to be made. For this reason it is also the data level that should be most suitable for data exchange purposes. However, there are no standardised formats today for level 2 data so this is an area where there is a great need for harmonisation. Common features of level 2 data formats between EISCAT and the US systems were identified and reported in COOPEUS Deliverable 2.2 (Gap Analysis Report) and they could function as a starting point for the definition of a common format for these data. Further work in this area is needed for this harmonisation to become reality.
The incoherent scatter radar community has a well-established data container for the storage of level 3 data as functions of space and time: the Madrigal distributed database system. Its development begun in 1980 at Millstone Hill and it is now the standard repository for all participating incoherent scatter radar data systems. Madrigal aims at using the standardised and flexible HDF5 format in future releases in order to remove some limitations inherent in the format.
A small set of use cases were proposed in Task 2.4 (Definition of potential case studies to harmonise standards and improve interoperability) in order to test the level of harmonisation and interoperability between EISCAT and the US ISR facilities:
• Low-level data interchange between EISCAT and US ISR facilities, using a common data format, and applying the local analysis software of the different facilities on the same data set. The results should then be compared and any differences between the results have to be analysed carefully.
• A collaborative international radar school should be arranged to educate in the use of both EISCAT and US ISR systems. The abilities of the students could later be tested by letting them change between facilities. This would also be a test of the interoperability of the radars.
• An integrated ionospheric image could be prepared by letting EISCAT and at least one US ISR facility operate together in response to a geophysical trigger. This would function both as a test of the protocols for the coordination of the ISR systems and of the harmonisation of the observation programmes.
• A real-time display of ionospheric conditions using data from both EISCAT and US ISR facilities on the same website could be prepared. This would require giving the Madrigal system access to the data earlier than is being done today. Depending on data policies, this will at the present be restricted to times when Common Programmes are running since this case study requires open data access.
• A parametrised risk factor, for instance for high altitude air travel, could be estimated by integrating data obtained by EISCAT and US ISR systems into an ionospheric model to perform now-casting. This requires looking into methods and protocols to export data into space weather services in a harmonised manner.
• A direct interchange of experimental setup is a straightforward test of interoperability of the systems. This involves running an experiment designed for one facility on another one.
Finally, a common approach to facility scheduling and operating procedures was developed in Task 2.5 (Construction of a joint atmospheric radar roadmap) in order to optimise the coordination of European and US ISR facilities at the operational and observational levels. This effort resulted in a roadmap for collaborations in incoherent scatter radar operations where a set of recommendations were identified for organisations operating ISR systems, and in addition also a set of recommendations on the facility level, both for planned new systems and for updates and upgrades of existing systems.
The organisation level recommendations are:
• Identify a sustainable arena that is suitable for discussions on international coordination.
• Follow the COOPEUS joint data policy.
• Work towards the introduction of persistent data identifiers.
• Agree on a level 2 data standard and make sure that it is suitable for long term storage.
• Make sure that the level 3 data produced are fit to be used in common data portals by connecting sufficient amount of meta-data.
• Prepare protocols for migration of data, both to new formats and new depositories.
• Open for possibilities to implement a common scheduling and operational philosophy.
• Continue the incoherent scatter world days planning as it is done now.
• Make sure that protocols exist for event-driven observations, where one facility/organisation can suggest operation of other facilities/organisations.
• Make efforts to expand the ISR community through high visibility and good connection to academic institutions.
• Identify projects for training and exchange of radar operating engineers.
• Continue the incoherent scatter radar summer schools.
• Identify projects for coordinating outreach efforts.
The facility level recommendations are:
• Aim for using harmonised level 1 data format for the internal data processing.
• Ensure that data migration activities follow strategy protocols.
• Use the ENVRI reference model as a guideline for the data framework.
• Ensure that standard operating modes are defined for producing long-term continuous data sets that can be used to observe ionospheric changes over time.
• Open for activities involving exchange of engineers for training purposes.
3.1.2 WP3: Carbon Observations; ICOS (EU) and NEON (USA)
WP-leader: CEA
The development of Research Infrastructures in Europe and US created a unique framework to develop common strategies and methods that will enhance measurements interoperability, reducing their uncertainty and stimulating future common EU-US research activities.
WP3 brings together ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observing System), measuring GHG in the atmosphere, at terrestrial ecosystems and in the ocean, and NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network), measuring fluxes and concentration of GHG at observatories as part of its ecosystem observation mission. Participating institutes for ICOS are key partners in the European Infrastructure: CEA (leading the ICOS Atmospheric Thematic Center) and University of Tuscia (leading the Ecosystem Thematic Center). Other entities involved include AmeriFlux and NOAA/GMD on US side, ensuring interoperability through the frameworks recommended by GEO and GEOSS. They successfully have created synergies in view of the international requirements stated in the IPCC 5th Assessment Report 2013 and the GEO Carbon Strategy 2010 report.
The objective of COOPEUS is to coordinate the harmonization and integration plans for these carbon observations between Europe and the US. Even though both ICOS and NEON have the ability to collaborate on effective issues, we fully recognize that this effort cannot be effectively accomplished without the engagement of many other partners, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Division (US NOAA GMD), the AmeriFlux network (US-DoE), the Group on Earth Observations (GEO, www.earthobservations.org),the Group of Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS),
World Meteorological Organization (WMO, www.wmo.int) the Belmont Forum (www.igfagcr.org) NSF-supported EarthCube (earthcube.ning.com) and DataOne (www.dataone.org) projects, and a wide variety of regional-based flux networks also outside Europe and USA. Of course as COOPEUS continues to advance, this list of partners is not exclusive and is expected to increase. COOPEUS aims to strengthen and complement these partnerships through a variety of governance mechanisms, some informal and others formalized (e.g. Memorandum of Understanding), tailored to each individual organizational governance structure. Several organizations mentioned above have a history of collaborating and sharing of data. In this historical context, we also have recognized what has worked, exiting limitations, and what can be improved in terms of data sharing and interoperability. This COOPEUS work task is building upon these relationships and working history to strengthen these approaches and collaboration.
Data sharing across the Atlantic, data gap identification
All the entities involved in carbon research and monitoring were invited to participate to the elaboration of a common position on data management issues across carbon related networks, to be consolidated into Deliverable 3.1 “Report on Data sharing across the Atlantic: Gap analysis and development of a common understanding”, December 2013. The main topics discussed through a series of meetings, either virtual or face-to-face, were:
1. Information infrastructure interoperability, requiring traceability of measurements, algorithm and protocols, informatics;
2. Perimeter of data definition and associated intellectual property issues, including calling for open access, metadata as description of the data, solving for IPR difference, and securing data integrity.
3. Timing of data sharing is an issue, with agencies allowing embargo while other promote fast availability of environmental data;
4. Joint quality control and assurance plan, including inter-comparison programs and calibration, redundancy, standardization and management strategy
5. Commercial activities, with different approaches of for-profit usage of data
6. Data ownership, citation, acknowledgement and traceability, including the importance of bibliometric indicators linked to data production, and co-authorship as a key aspects of data policies in RIs;
7. Metadata harmonization toward a unified definition of metadata
Harmonizing protocols, measurements, metadata and data formats
ICOS (Europe) and NEON (US) developed in parallel, while the research communities to which they are tied (CarboEurope and AmeriFlux respectively) are collaborating across the Atlantic since two decades. Historically, the exchange of data and the search for standards has been partly limited by the fragmentation of the measurement networks, often based on short-term and focused research projects. This in turn limited the comparability of the data acquired in the two continents and increased the level of uncertainty in cross-continental analysis. This situation was partly mitigated by global initiatives such as WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch and FLUXNET, where experts met and compared their data, compiling joint databases of harmonized measurements. While NOAA's atmospheric network grew over the last two decades, the research infrastructures ICOS and NEON created more recently a new situation whereby data and standards are standardized, at least at the regional level (US, Europe).
In the context of COOPEUS, a number of exchanges in particular between Europe and USA have been organized. These exchanges involved mainly people from ICOS, NEON and AmeriFlux but they have been also organized in order to extend the collaboration and coordination activities beyond these two infrastructures. In particular, discussions and exchanges have been organized with USCCC/ChinaFlux and the Brazilian network of ecosystem sites. In line with the work plan, the impact of these visits was to ensure that protocols across these networks are comparable and that joint activities are started in order to increase the level of harmonization beyond the USA-Europe system.
In addition to these visits, and within the three years of project time, WP3 Carbon observations has organised approx. 13 strategic face-to-face working group meetings as well as regular telephone conferences of various formats. The aim of these virtual or real meeting was to deepen the mutual understanding of data policies and interoperability in the perimeter of WP3 and to prepare and build joint progress in Carbon research infrastructures. Work was performed in a transatlantic and international context, and was not limited to ICOS and NEON, but also generally involved scientists and engineers of other Carbon observation networks.
A detailed description of all events including the personal exchanges can be found in Deliverable 3.3 “Report from working groups”, July 2015 and Deliverable 3.4 “Report from working groups”, July 2015.
Joint EU US ICOS-NEON-NOAA user workshop on infrastructure and data use
In the frame of COOPEUS, the importance of securing the interoperability of distributed observatories across the Atlantic has received strong support. Even though ICOS and NEON have a certain number of common data products, the data products, algorithmic approaches, work and data flows and overarching mission are structured differently. NEON has adopted a cause and effect paradigm to estimate carbon biogeochemistry from the local to continental scales, and has imbedded these measurements as part of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem functioning. ICOS, on the other hand, is designed to constrain the carbon cycle at the regional scale, with coverage of fluxes over ocean and land. As with all networks, they also have inherently different constraints on their databases and associated informatics. Finally, NEON is essentially funded by a single agency, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), whereas ICOS is a consortium of different, coordinated funding sources and joint governance by a number of agencies from several EU countries, and the European Commission.
Despite these factors of programmatic heterogeneity, there are more similarities and synergies between these two Observatories that present large opportunities in providing new scientific understanding by harmonizing joint approaches, removing barriers, documenting and supporting the joint workability of the data. As such, protocol harmonization, common vocabulary, data access services compatibility are required as both, ICOS and NEON, will be serving a number of users with a variety of expectations and needs. This clearly applies also to AmeriFlux that was also involved in the discussion and harmonization process.
To reach the users, a workshop entitled “ICOS-NEON Carbon training workshop” has been designed, held in 2014 and 2015, as a user-oriented curriculum intended to provide a cohort of early career scientists with the skills to use large-scale carbon data (e.g. NEON and ICOS data).
One goal of this workshop was to highlight emerging applications of carbon-cycle related data, such as that collected by ICOS and NEON, by building a platform and bringing together senior and early-career scientists to document future data and service needs to guide the development of the research infrastructures. Workshop topics provided a detailed view of atmospheric and ecosystem monitoring carbon GHG measurements of carbon Infrastructures across the Atlantic and different networks This training workshop aimed at inspiring early career scientists dedicated to carbon and greenhouse gas research and training early adopters of the joint harmonized datasets. In addition, practical use cases and scientific hands-on approaches were conducted, focused on emerging applications to raise the awareness and curiosity of participants for data fusion techniques across scale, thematic and regional boundaries.
This workshop brought together early-career scientists (including advanced PhD students and postdocs) and future data users interested in emergent issues and methods wishing to broaden and deepen their knowledge and to identify new research opportunities opened by the availability of measurements acquired by these new carbon research infrastructures. This was a group of diverse and deeply committed participants with equal gender distribution, with most participants conducting research in a country different than their birth country. World-renowned speakers came from the US and several European countries. We held an open application process that was disseminated in the scientific communities by e-mail lists and webpage announcement.
Deliverable 3.2 “Report on EU-US users perspectives”, October 2014 gives a detailed overview about the content, with a detailed list of speakers and presentations.
In addition, COOPEUS strategy has been presented also at the User workshop organized in Boulder (USA) in 2014 and 2015 (FLUXCOURSE) where NEON is also participating.
Interoperability and Interworkability analysis
Task 3.4 has analyzed specifically the issues and options in the interoperability and interworkability of the EU and US GHG research infrastructures. To better evaluate the comparability of measurements in ICOS Ecosystem and NEON, co-location of systems in both ICOS and NEON has been proposed. The selection of the first ICOS Ecosystem site where the NEON standard equipment will be installed is started with an open call for applications from the ICOS Head Office which will be concluded by end of 2015 in order to start the NEON tower facility building in early 2016.
Interoperability of atmospheric data is secured by the ICOS Central Analytical Laboratories (CAL) and the Atmospheric Thematic Center (ATC). In complement, the ICOS Carbon Portal (Ingrid van der Laan-Luijkx) together with NOAA ESRL (Ken Masarie) have prepared the GLOBALVIEWplus (GV+) cooperative data product. GV+ is a data package that includes 205 atmospheric carbon dioxide records derived from observations made by 25 laboratories from 16 countries. Data for the period 1968-2014 (where available) are included on an hourly time step for all high-frequency (quasi-continuous) measurements. Out of the 205 data sets, 21 data sets are from 12 potential ICOS stations, measured by 11 European laboratories. GV+ includes (besides the data sets themselves): metadata, a summary of included data sets, an e-mail address list of all data providers, and the complete set of configuration files used to prepare the product. GV+ uses a fair use statement as well as a required citation including DOI to ensure fair credit to the contributing laboratories for their work. GV+ can be obtained directly from the ObsPack Data Portal at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/obspack/.
To analyze the interoperability of data across the Atlantic through the most demanding usage of carbon data, COOPEUS partners ICOS and NEON convened a Data assimilation workshop at the Cité Universitaire, Paris/France, April 20-21, 2015. The initial objective from this work task 3.4 was to ‘compare experiences and identify issues encountered by the users’, more specifically ‘model-data fusion experts’. We brought together a diverse group of representatives of TRANSCOM, MACC, CARBONTRACKER, Global Carbon Project, and other model data fusion experts around the joint use of EU and US infrastructure. Representatives of FLUXNET, GEOLAND, and other data user were participating in the workshop. The aim to gather communities and groups has been successful. Greenhouse gas modeling scientists, from ocean, surface flux and atmospheric expertise, working at the forefront of data model fusion research also working across scales, disciplines, and involved in education, communication and community engagement. We set two primary objectives to the workshop, i) to present and discuss recent progress of the state of the art of data assimilation approaches - since data assimilation is considered as a large, if not the largest, potential use of data originating from various networks and hence a proxy for interoperability requirement of C networks-, and ii) to gather input on the data management, informatics, and workflow needs for this research community. Details about the workshop can be found in Deliverable 3.5 “Report on the Model data fusion workshop”, June 2015.
3.1.3 WP4 - Ocean Observation; EMSO (EU) and OOI (USA)
WP lead: INGV
WP4 had as a main goal to generate the ground for a sustainable, collaborative working environment between the OOI and EMSO large-scale research infrastructures for ocean observation and also aimed at fostering a long-term collaboration between OOI and EMSO with the ultimate goal of preparing the ground for a shared and mutually beneficial scientific partnership able to improve scientists’ capability to reply to the challenging issues of environment and climate change.
In the first phase of COOPEUS, EMSO and OOI have set the framework for la ong-term collaboration plan. The plan recognized that EMSO and OOI share a wide disciplinary spectrum (physical oceanography, biogeochemistry, marine ecology and geohazards), face similar technological challenges (deployment, management and maintenance of equipment) and ICT developments for data management and device control infrastructure. The convergence towards a common vision of the role of the ocean observation research infrastructure for Earth System Science has been easily reached and recognized as a solid base for ongoing collaborations. In particular the complementarity in the geographical coverage is considered as an important added value in order to enable the interlinked use of ocean data and thus increase predictive capacities of global modeling.
Furthermore, a gab analysis of the data policies and procedures identified the grounds upon which a platform for long-term sharing of oceanic data across the Atlantic shall be build. The following aspects were identified as being essential for a successful collaboration:
- General principles for a shared data policy:
• Free an open access for data, data and sensor metadata
• Data citations requirements
• Standardisation of core data, quality assessment, practices/protocols for field work observations
- Interconnection of data and data metadata
• Initial common vocabulary for the selected physical parameters with unambiguous, univocal definitions
• Initial common catalogue of metadata related to selected physical parameters in terms of attributes definition
• Identification of common basic control checks and set-up of corresponding quality levels
- Interconnection of sensor metadata
• common sensor catalogue for a basic suite of sensors (including settings parameters, calibration procedures)
• principles (practical and strategic) for a shared sensor registry
• Adoption of similar sensor metadata descriptions, attributes, attribute content and formats.
In the second phase of COOPEUS, WP4 has facilitated the establishment of a network of institutions involved with the collection of Oceanic data across the North Atlantic through a group of key expert people. Apart from EMSO and OOI; the participation of a Canadian ocean observation team from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) was facilitated and considered a valuable component. A cross-disciplinary dimension was added as Solid Earth expertise from within the COOPEUS community was included in the network in order to also include ocean seismological data. The member of the trans-Atlantic team are:
EMSO (EU): Mairi Best, Laura Beranzoli, Francesco Chierici, Davide Embriaco, Paolo Favali, John Picard, Massimiliano Rossi, Nevio Zitellini
OOI (USA): Robert Weller, Nan Galbraith, Deborah Kelly, Oscar Scofield, Scott Glenn, John Delaney, John Orcutt
ONC (CAN): Martin Heesemann, Martin Scherwath, Benoit Pirenne, Tania Insua
IRIS (USA): Tim Ahern
UNAVCO (USA): Chuck Meertens
This experts’ network developed around subjects both technological in essence (e.g. seafloor seismological data flowing in real-time in monitoring and warning systems, harmonization of metadata catalogues across the RIs for data interoperability) and scientific (real time joint analysis of bottom pressure and seismological data and use of GPS data jointly with pressure data to improve the reliability of an early detection and recognition of tsunami waves) which have been recognized as compelling; these areas lack a robust and comprehensive frame of best practices due to the novelty of these research infrastructures, and development in the comprehension of socially important natural processes.
A major achievement of WP4 was the conduction of a User scenario ‘Tsunami dynamics and Early Warning Systems for Near Source Areas (Mediterranean, Juan de Fuca)’, which worked as a practical illustration of the benefits obtained by connecting research infrastructures across the at Atlantic while facing up to the challenges associated the natural risks of Tsunamis that may threaten socio-economic development, particularly in densely populated areas. Expertise from the cross-disciplinary group of experts made the conduction of the user-scenario possible and facilitated directly involvement of some EMSO Nodes, such as Western Ionian Sea (Mediterranean) and Gulf of Cadiz (North-east Atlantic), and the OOI Cabled Ocean Sensing Network on the Juan De Fuca Plate.
3.1.4 WP5 - Solid Earth Dynamics; EPOS (EU) and Earthscope (USA)
WP-lead: KNMI
WP5 coordinated the long-term integration plans for solid Earth science envisioned by EPOS (European Plate Observing System) in Europe and EarthScope in the US, ensuring interoperability through the frameworks recommended by GEO (SS). These long-term integration plans for solid Earth science infrastructures specifically aim at the interoperability of multidisciplinary data and computational research infrastructures through the development of standards and concepts for data discovery, information access and computational research environments. In COOPEUS WP5 the following achievements were established:
▪ Standardization of data and access service (GSAC): within COOPEUS the data interoperability requirements for GNSS (geodetic) data and products are summarized by the adoption of the GSAC (Geodesy Seamless Archive Centers) standard, developed by UNAVCO, by the European infrastructures (EUREF). This standard offers interfaces (e.g. webservice, API) to serve individuals, researchers and higher level clients to leverage the search for and harvest of data. The standardization will guarantee further interoperability between EarthScope and EPOS-IP, both on the level of the geodetic data community (TCS (Thematic Core Service) in EPOS-IP) and on the level of the Integrated Core Services (ICS) in EPOS-IP.
▪ Metadata standardization: GSAC supports queries for metadata about geodesy sites and instruments, and provides access to instrumental metadata. Harmonizing and standardizing the access to this very important type of metadata by the geodetic community is crucial for both individual researchers and for multidisciplinary infrastructures like EPOS.
▪ Data interoperability requirements: a number of data interoperability requirements were summarized that have been identified during discussions within different EC infrastructure projects and globally (e.g. IRIS, FDSN, UNAVCO, EUREF). The requirements challenge the existing infrastructures to further develop standards and adapt their structures to meet those standards and ensure long-term sustainability. The COOPEUS project provided the unique opportunity to collaborate with UNAVCO and EUREF to share experiences and identify bottlenecks for creating a new cyber-infrastructure for GNSS data and services provision.
Seismology
▪ Standardization of seismic station metadata: global coordination within the FDSN by ORFEUS (EU) and IRIS (US) on defining a new standard for the exchange of seismic station metadata in XML format: StationXML (http://www.fdsn.org/xml/station).
▪ Standardization of FDSN webservices: FDSN standardized webservices (API’s) to discover and access waveform data and related metadata (http://www.fdsn.org/webservices/FDSN-WS-Specifications-1.0.pdf) as well as various earthquake parameters, that have been implemented in various data centers providing a uniform, shared abstraction layer to seismic data and metadata archives. Within the FDSN three webservices have been adopted as standard (http://www.fdsn.org/webservices/):
fdsnws-station – for access to station metadata in FDSN StationXML format
fdsnws-dataselect – for access to time series data in mini-SEED format
fdsnws-event – for access to event parameters in QuakeML format
Currently 13 globally distributed data archive centers deploy two or more of these services.
▪ Standardization of persistent identifiers (DOI): the EU-US coordination within the FDSN standardized a system for referencing seismic networks by the attribution of persistent identifiers to seismic networks (http://dx.doi.org/10.7914/D11596) through the DOI framework. Attribution to permanent and temporary seismic networks is by using FDSN Network Codes (http://www.fdsn.org/networks) and the inclusion of the DOI in StationXML.
▪ Federation of data centers: European establishment of a distributed data centre system called EIDA (European Integrated Data Archive; http://www.orfeus-eu.org/eida) that provides transparent access to high quality seismological data from large, interconnected data archives in Europe. On-going EU-US coordination to federate the large, complex data archive systems in both EU and US and to define business rules to return data from the “authoritative” center and to properly address advanced technical implementations (e.q. data quality metadata) and political issues (e.g. authentication, AAI, IPR) are on-going. Within EPOS a policy and access rules document has been developed, which will have impact on the interoperability requirements. Currently, this policy is not been discussed on a global scale.
▪ Project interactions: with EU H2020 projects EPOS-IP (http://www.epos-eu.org) EUDAT2020 (http://eudat.eu/ ), ENVRI+ (http://envri.eu/ ) to coordinate developments of new techniques and services to the research community for discovering and processing data in a trusted environment, allowing data tracking by persistent identifiers (PID’s) and improved data citing by DOI. In Europe, in particular within EUDAT2020, the use of the Handle System is being tested and investigated in order to attribute PID’s to waveform data. Currently 3 EIDA nodes, participating in EUDAT2020, are using PID’s in data replication, currently estimated at 80 TB. On-going discussion with EarthCube (http://earthcube.org; US) and EPOS on interoperability and data sharing facilities across the geosciences (multi-disciplinary, global data discovery).
▪ Coordination on data management services and data curation: Data replication and curation implementation strategies in US and EU being implemented (US: Service Oriented Architecture, webservices) and EUDAT2020 services (EU) in relation to PID’s within the EIDA infrastructure.
▪ Providing data facilities: existing infrastructure in both EU and US provide their data facilities for complex and large research monitoring projects (e.g. USarray, AlpArray).
Deep scientific drilling
Scientific deep drilling is a unique approach to obtain data for understanding structures and processes in the Earth. Scientists in EPOS and EarthScope are involved in the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (IDCP) to elaborate on a position paper on the long term vision of global deep scientific drilling and the relation to practical applications (e.g. seismic hazard, mitigation).
3.1.5 WP6– Biodiversity; LifeWatch (EU) and NEON (USA)
WP-lead: CSIC
An initial fact finding and analysis phase identifying commonalities and differences between the two involved RIs allowed for the establishment of close link between LifeWatch and NEON.
One of the major achievements of WP6 was the identification of key points where cooperation at global level is most relevant for Biodiversity & Ecosystems Research Infrastructures. These key points were identified at different levels
• The need to address GLOBAL CHALLENGES
• The impact of challenges on corresponding impact on POLICIES
• Cooperation at the level of operation of Research Infrastructures
• The interoperability requirements both at DATA and SERVICES layer
In this way COOPEUS WP6 has contributed on these key points by:
• Understanding the structure of the communities and how they can address a GLOBAL CHALLENGE, under a global perspective, both geographical and disciplinary.
• Identifying the difficulties of unique approaches in the ICT layer
• Designing a GLOBAL PLAN
• Defining a Collaborative Framework (VCoP)
The dissemination of the approach towards addressing Global Challenges was supported by participating in the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco with a COOPEUS/COOP+ booth.
Furthermore, WP6 demonstrated the benefits of cross-disciplinary transatlantic collaboration on biodiversity and carbon cycling by conducting a realistic user scenario focusing on the integration and use of phenology data from different continents.
Many of the COOPEUS ideas are being put into practice in the current implementation of the LifeWatch e-Infrastructure pilot at Estacion Biologica de Doñana, that will be launched in 2016.
The harmonization of EU-US biodiversity information management strategies started with the analysis of the questionnaires distributed in August 2013 and of the different workshops where COOPEUS WP6 has been present, and in particular the three day conference meeting organized by CSIC in Madrid in September 2013, that have provided the basis to analyze the information management strategies in the two main Research Infrastructures concerned, LifeWatch in EU and NEON in US. Also a review of the other different projects and initiatives related to this topic was made, and in particular the work in other international projects like CreativeB.
A GLOBAL PLAN, reported in D6.3 was presented in several COOPEUS meetings, and the corresponding scheme is presented in the following picture:
This work was followed by the identification of common data and knowledge services and the definition of potential case studies to harmonise standards and to improve interoperability
A Case Study that was reconsidered in the AGU meeting in December 2013, was further explored in a dedicated splinter meeting organized by COOPEUS-WP6 at EGU’2014. A refined proposal for a Case Study on Data Model fusion using phenological data to inform productivity model was presented by Hank Loescher from NEON at the COOPEUS Annual Meeting in Helsinki in September 2014. The proposal followed up on the ideas previously discussed around the Global Carbon Cycle, starting from the fact that the uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks stems from structural, parameter, initial conditions and boundary conditions uncertainties, while there is available data providing both detailed site-based process information and spatial measures of pattern and process that can be integrated into an Earth system model. The discussion identified ways to link WP3 and WP6 around this topic.
A follow-up meeting was then organized in San Francisco at the AGU meeting in December 2015, to progress on how to address this Case Study, and in particular to analyze both the scientific case and the organizational issues within COOPEUS. The meeting discussed in depth the different ingredients in the Case Study, including the different models in US and EU, the data sources (from the National Phenology Network NPN in US, and from the pep725 network in EU) and was further elaborated in the last deliverable reported for WP6, D6.4.
The work on the design of a common EU-US Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) Platform on Biodiversity was focused on studying how to setup a VCOP for the Case Study analyzed in T6.3. The challenge of defining both the relevant community and the associated knowledge map were described in D6.4. A significant technical effort was put into understanding the associated tools, in particular the VIVO framework, and contrasting them with other existing options.
3.2 S & T results/foregrounds of Cross-disciplinary work-packages
3.2.1 WP7– Common data Policies and Standards (WP lead: UniHB, Contributions: All WPs)
WP-Lead: UniHB
Status quo assessment of data management workflows, standards and policies.
Workpackage seven’s activities initially focused on the status quo assessment of research infrastructures on both sides of the Atlantic. A Web-based questionnaire was used to analyse the status quo of the COOPEUS research infrastructure community. The survey focused on the analysis of the level of standardisation reached by each infrastructure, the identification of data management workflows within each infrastructure as well as the identification of policies applied to data access and dissemination. Both, an online version as well as a Word version of the survey was sent to European as well as to US research infrastructure representatives. Responses have been amended during a dedicated meeting and face-to-face interviews with representatives of the RIs as well as by using the gap and commonalities analyses of WPs 2-6. Results of the survey have been condensed within a standards communality matrix which allows identifying the fields of technical compatibilities between contributing RIs.
In general, the status quo assessment showed that COOPEUS research infrastructures have undertaken important steps to provide access to their metadata. The overall availability of metadata is very good and the majority of RIs offer metadata in XML or ASCII format which is well suited for integration purposes. Open access is offered for the majority of metadata delivered by COOPEUS research infrastructures. The level of standardisation of metadata formats is promising; Dublin Core and ISO19115 compatible are most common. A future suitable basic, common metadata format might therefore be represented by a common extended Dublin Core format. Metadata access via standardised interfaces is well advanced but needs improvement. While many infrastructures offer public access to their metadata via the internet, GEOSS accepted standard interfaces are offered by a minority of RIs. Most common is the OpenSearch interface. A detailed analysis has been submitted as deliverable D7.1.
Interdisciplinary core standards and interoperability COOPEUS could reach significant progress towards the definition of core standards. During the ‘COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT strategic workshop on future harmonization of data sharing among Research Infrastructures’ and follow-up workshops such as the ‘Dynamic Data’ workshop during the 3rd EUDAT conference, (Sept. 2014), which have jointly been organized with EUDAT and ENVRI, COOPEUS addressed the still open issue of persistent identifiers (PID) for dynamic time series, a common problem among all involved research infrastructures. The findings of these workshops joint have been condensed within a white paper entitled: ‘Data citation and digital identifiers for time series data / environmental research infrastructures’ which was published as Open Access document on figshare as well as within a peer-reviewed journal article entitled ‘DOI for geoscience data - how early practices shape present perceptions’ published in Earth Science Informatics in 2015. Work has been conducted in close cooperation with RDA. COOPEUS member Ari Asmi has volunteered as Co-Chair of the RDA working group on Data Citation. Consequently, our results on dynamic data citation have been incorporated into the corresponding RDA case statement proposal and communicated during RDA meetings in 2014 and 2015.
Cooperation with GEOSS was of key importance for this work package. During telcons and via email, COOPEUS has intensively collaborated with members of the GEOSS Standards and Interoperability Forum (SIF). COOPEUS has decided to use the GEOSS CSR as part of the future interoperability framework and consequently, COOPEUS has made intensive use of the existing GEOSS infrastructure and RI representatives have registered their resources, standards and services at the GEOSS Components and Services Registry (CSR). COOPEUS used GEOSS metadata exchange interfaces to access these records and to offer a web-based ’COOPEUS registry’. During a ‘Hands-on Workshop for registering and accessing COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)’ in 2014, COOPEUS has identified several potential improvements for the GEOSS GCI.
Based on the practical experiences COOPEUS members have made with the GEOSS CSR, recommendations for the advancement of the GEOSS CSR have been fed back to GEOSS:
• With the introduction of the broker concept, the use and visibility of the GCI has raised significantly.
• Through resource registration by COOPEUS partners, the GCI registration process can be further improved.
• The workshop aimed to nurture the user feedback process that is inherent to GEOSS; only if the GCI has passed a certain critical mass in regard to the registered resources will it be possible to keep the feedback process going.
• More effort should go in the direction of accelerating the registration process, curating the collected information, and adapting the GCI to the diverse user needs
• The current and future role of the GCI has to be depicted in more detail and communicated to the broader earth observing community
• The GCI could play a role as a figurehead for GEOSS, but in that case there has to be a clear strategy defined how this can be implemented
Common data and IPR policy In an early phase of the project, a dedicated meeting on data and IPR issues took place during the EGU 2013, which resulted in a set of core principles for data and metadata sharing: the ‘COOPEUS data sharing principles’, a short set of guidelines defining the basic principles for data and metadata sharing agreed upon by all COOPEUS partners, which served as the basis for the development of the joint data policy. Based on existing data policies from COOPEUS research infrastructures, a compilation of informal policies we collected using the OpenDOAR data policy tool as well as under consideration of legal aspects, we have subsequently amended the COOPEUS data sharing principles by adding additional paragraphs reflecting the identified commonalities and compiled a short set of core data and IPR data sharing rules which has iteratively been discussed and refined by the COOPEUS RI community and accordingly recommendations to amend or improve RI data policies have been discussed. The resulting joint core data and IPR policy was submitted as deliverable D 7.2 ‘Joint core data and IPR policy’.
Joint standardization and policy framework Based on the results of Task 7.1 COOPEUS has established a set of ‘interoperability maturity criteria’ defining the level of interoperability of a research infrastructure in terms of access policies, data as well as metadata exchange. These criteria were established based on the COOPEUS status quo assessment, the commonalities matrix and the gap and commonalities analysis of WPs 2-6. The COOPEUS ‘interoperability maturity criteria’ aim to identify and rate three essential interoperability capabilities: to register and share metadata, to gain access to data as well as to implement an Open Access data policy. Based on these criteria, COOPEUS has set up a user-friendly online tool which allows anonymous interoperability maturity self-assessments and is integrated within the COOPEUS website.
COOPEUS already was successful to harmonize RI specific data policies on both sides of the Atlantic and to set up a common core data policy which takes these differing frameworks into account. In order to allow a more formal approach for data exchange among scientists and users involved in Europe’s major environmental research infrastructure projects with their US counterparts we have prepared templates which can be used to specify Moratoria of Understandings (MoU) to define the rules of data sharing. While initially the purpose of the MoU template was to focus on policy and intellectual property rights (IPR) it turned out that a broader approach is required. As a result, the following MoU template therefore takes into account more aspects of technical and scientific cooperation among Research Infrastructures. The template has been submitted in due time as Deliverable 7.4 (MoU Template for IPR).
Within this task we further have summarized the major outcomes of this work package and within the COOPEUS ‘Joint Standardisation Handbook’ (D 7.5) which includes information from relevant COOPEUS project documents related to protocols, data formats, policy and communication procedures that are used by some or all of the participating research projects and infrastructures. The Handbook summarizes some of the major efforts achieved during COOPEUS by WP7 and aims to condense our experiences within a series of simple guidelines.
3.2.2 WP8 Description of the main S & T results/foregrounds – Common Research infrastructure framework
WP-lead: FMI/MI, Contributions: All WPs
In general, all the WP8 activities were targeted to meet two goals: 1) to establish a well-defined common strategy and the action plan for the future transatlantic collaboration and 2) to align COOPEUS work with the activities of existing international initiatives and bodies. The main results of WP8 have been published in the Deliverables: D8.2 Summary report of COOPEUS research infrastructures, D8.4 COOPEUS roadmap and D8.5 COOPEUS in the global context report. Below are presented the main findings of these deliverables.
Commonalities, opportunities and development needs of COOPEUS partner RIs
During the first year of the COOPEUS activities the WP2-WP6 were working on identifying commonalities and opportunities for their transatlantic collaborations and as expected, the counterpart RIs found plenty of commonalities and opportunities for the future collaboration on data interoperability. As a WP8 activity, it was also important to identify and pull out the joint development needs that could help research infrastructures to progress with the interoperability challenge. The WP8 team summarized the development needs in three categories:
a) Technical cooperation, containing direct developments to the infrastructures, in physical level (e.g. joint measurement sites, instrumentation development) or in computational level (e.g. metadata standardization);
b) Information and personnel exchange, containing direct communication between the RIs, common workshops and newsletters, and direct personnel exchange for efficient building of trust and common practices;
c) Outreach Collaboration, containing collaboration on the communication and interaction with outside actors, such as users, stakeholders or general public.
COOPEUS Roadmap From Month18 to Month 36 an extensive COOPEUS roadmap process were facilitated by WP8. During the process, three elements of strategic process were discussed and developed –
1) Evaluation of the current transatlantic research infrastructure landscape 2) Definition of common COOPEUS mission statement 3) Identification of the action plan.
Transatlantic research infrastructure landscape
The environmental RIs are often built from bottom-up needs of the scientific communities, bringing together and developing the naturally forming collaborations needed for Earth/Environmental System sciences. Therefore, the original aim, scope and the construction set-up of the environmental RIs have been initiated by different needs and have resulted in very different realizations of the RIs. This bottom-up, community-driven development pathway has created a heterogeneous landscape, with diversity of disciplines and approaches. This makes the landscape analysis and understanding the field more challenging. The heterogeneity is however also very valuable from the Earth/Environmental System understanding point-of-view, as the naturally developed viewpoints are often optimal to specific problems or processes. Earth Systems are tremendously complex systems, and our ability to comprehensively understand these systems must be derived from different and complementary scientific disciplines and approaches.
The EU landscape of the RIs is very much defined by the ESFRI roadmap and associated processes from the European Commission. These actions make some issues related to the landscape analysis easier: There is a common European context (at least for recent RI developments) and the RIs from different disciplines have common organizational levels. Even on the EU side, the complexity of the RI viewpoints and RI aspects makes it hard to present the overall landscape using any of the potential mapping parameters. A full analysis of the RI land scape can be found in the COOPEUS roadmap report D8.4.
On the US side, the word “research infrastructure” is more general and has different definitions for their respective agencies, sponsors and organisations. In addition, many of the observatory/research infrastructure-type organisations can be single (member) State-owned as in the EU, or supported by a single Federal agency, or some combination thereof as in the US. This sometimes results in a mis-match of funding approaches. In COOPEUS, we focussed the landscape analyses on the scientific capabilities, rather than on the programmatic structures that enable them. In Europe the focus has been on the pan-European level of research infrastructure, sbut on the US side we also decided to concentrate on the Federal level organisations and service providers. In Europe, also the strategic decision on pan-European level RI activities is centralised to the ESFRI and in addition to the EU Member State funding, EC is also providing coordination support for European level RIs. Therefore, also the RI funding policy landscape is coordinated, as in the US the multitude of Federal agencies and funding bodies involved in the RI operations make the identification of US RIs even harder.
COOPEUS mission statement:
COOPEUS facilitate the global accessibility of data from research infrastructures to advance our understanding across Earth systems through an international RI community driven effort, by:
1) Removing technical, scientific, cultural and geopolitical barriers for data use;
2) Promoting the flow, quality and preservation of information;
3) Engaging user communities; and
4) Accompanying societal and scientific needs.
This mission statement was formulated in a collaborative effort initiated at the Annual meeting 2014 in Helsinki, and the mission statement was elaborated on following meetings at AGU and EGU. The purpose is to facilitate the evolution of international research infrastructures to advance our understanding of Earth systems through four strategic goals:
Strategic Goal 1: Removing technical, scientific, cultural and geopolitical barriers for data use, e.g.
• Develop support mechanisms to assure data sovereignty
• Promote free, open, timely access of data and the associated data policies
• Harmonize the protocols, algorithms, standards and best community practices
• Facilitate state-of-the-art data access methodologies (e.g. brokering) and development of novel data discovery tools
Strategic Goal 2: Coordinating the flow, integrity and preservation of information (among e-infrastructures), e.g.
• Develop and promote the use of persistent Identifiers
• Develop and promote the use of metadata and data format standards
• Develop and promote the use of ontologies, semantics, and controlled vocabularies
• Quality = data integrity?, or Quality = QA/QC, traceability, metrology
• Develop, promote sound, and execute defensible Data Management plans and archival guidelines
Strategic Goal 3: Engaging and enabling both bottom-up (user) and top-down (directives) communities, e.g.
• Managing a governance structure to foster a broad, bottom-up, open-engagement of all organizations interested in advancing our mission statement.
• Developing the virtual organizational structure and fostering the culture for re-use, re-purposing and the sustainment of the collective harmonization of data
• Optimizing data resources (avoiding functional and organizational redundancies)
• Comprehensive support for community engagement
Strategic Goal 4: Contribute to address evolving societal and scientific needs by providing information on Earth System, e.g.
• Identifying and being responsive to current and new scientific frontiers and decision-making needs
For each strategic goals, a set of actions were identified. The following summarise the main actions of the COOPEUS roadmap.
Short-term/Imperative
• Finding 1: Common description of data systems
To increase our knowledge of all the partners and related data providers’ data management systems
• Finding 2: Collaborative advancement on Standards and Metrology
To develop a community driven forum in partnership with standards holding bodies
• Finding 3: Supporting the common data licenses following Creative Commons standards
A COOPEUS action for comparing currently used licenses and support of the commonly acceptable Creative Common standard for research infrastructures is suggested for the future collaboration.
• Finding 4: Long-term preservation and certification of Research Infrastructure Data Centers
Mapping the COOPEUS partner RIs’ plans on the long-term preservation and seeking optimised international solutions for Earth system science data for long-term preservation.
Implementation of Geodetic Seamless Archive Centers (GSAC) software system (or API) by EPOS.
Support the full implementation of GSAC to the remaining EPOS institutions, and advance the use and future development through technical workshops such as the 2014 GSAC workshop in Portugal, and community forums.
• Finding 5: Advance the use of standard methodologies for use of Persistent Identifiers
This should be done in conjunction with larger interdisciplinary COOPEUS activity on data citation methodology, and broad engagement of other (domestic) organizations, e.g. ESIP, RDA, Belmont, Forum, ENVRIplus, etc.
• Finding 6: Creating interoperable Quality Assurance and Quality control (QA/QC) Methodologies
To identify the needed QA/QC approaches to manage joint uncertainties in data across the respective science fields, and develop and implement joint QA/QC plans.
While this is limited to solid earth and specifically seismological data types, IRIS and COOPEUS partners will foster coordination of QA efforts within the FDSN (International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks) in order to harmonize the approach to QA metrics across the FDSN members.
• Finding 7: Develop and execute defensible Data Management plans and archival guidelines
TBD
• Finding 8: training of Research Infrastructure users
Enhance the collaboration among the COOPEUS RIs on the user training by sharing best practises on organising training events and teaching methods.
• Finding 9: Training of staff and staff exchange
Research infrastructures can also support the staff mobility and building-up new career pathways via staff exchange programs and targeted cross-RI staff training courses (e.g. physical and online courses, webinars).
• Finding 10: Citizen Science
COOPEUS can provide a platform where the different experiences and knowledge can be shared among RIs.
• Finding 11: Communication strategy
Novel, easy and quick access to the new integrative tools is also vital, which implies that the IT community should be involved in the development of a new set of tools, however, the IT experts should carefully listen and respect the discipline related needs and traditions.
• Finding 12: Building common language and creating culture of open science
All the above-defined actions (imperatives and frontiers) in the Strategic Goals will promote the building of common language and creating culture of open science.
• Finding 13: Ethical perspectives of the data
TBD
• Finding 14: Common long-term COOPEUS platform
COOPEUS partner RIs have defined several steps on how to sustain the COOPEUS platform while seeking new funding opportunities for the collaboration.
COOPEUS partners will explore international / transatlantic funding opportunities to sustain the core activities of the COOPEUS platform to start working on the defined findings.
• Finding 15: Expansion of collaborative work and governance structure beyond Europe-US
COOPEUS RI partners shall continue to engage and seek opportunities with other international organizations towards broadening participation, advancing strategic goals, and building additional capacity.
Dynamically adapt current governance structures to accommodate new organizations (international entities, RI, federal agency programs, NGOs, and other funded projects).
• Finding 16 Use Case: Harmonization of Tsunami Data and Warning Processes
To achieve the harmonised tsunami data and warning system.
• Finding 17 Use Case: Expansion of federated services beyond Europe-US (Solid Earth)
Being able to federate services will increase the amount of data available globally—to other solid earth and seismological organizations with identical and harmonized data formats and through identical access mechanisms easing data discovery, access and usability.
• Finding 18 Use Case: Data – Model Fusion by linking the temporal information embedded in local-to-regional phenology (Biodiversity) to advance Ecosystem Production Model Fidelity (Carbon)
Compare the different sources of phenology observations, as well as the technical issues like different formats, conventions or quality assurance methods, employed in EU and US. Describe the methods used to access data.
Long-term/frontiers
• Finding 1: Common description of data systems
To better understand the needs and develop (accordingly) the different data quality indicators (data processing steps and data level definitions) and on service provision of high-level data products needed by the research infrastructures.
• Finding 2: Collaborative advancement on Standards and Metrology
Jointly develop the international discourse and forum to advance these Findings
• Finding 3: Supporting the common data licenses following Creative Commons standards
Jointly develop the international discourse and forum to advance these Findings.
• Finding 4: Long-term preservation and certification of Research Infrastructure Data Centers
Certify all COOPEUS data centres as WDS certified data centres (and in the case of renew the certification of the IRIS DMC).
• Finding 5: Advance the use of standard methodologies for use of Persistent Identifiers
Jointly develop the international discourse and forum to advance these Findings.
• Finding 6: Creating interoperable Quality Assurance and Quality control (QA/QC) Methodologies
RIS will introduce this concept at the FDSN meetings in 2015 in Prague (IUGG meeting).
Respective COOPEUS RIs (Carbon, Oceans, Solid Earth, Seismology, Biodiversity, Space Weather) to foster this discourse in respective international forums, and search resources to advance this Imperative, e.g. IRIS to introduce this concept at the FDSN meetings in 2015 in Prague (IUGG meeting).
• Finding 7: Develop, promote sound, and execute defensible Data Management plans and archival guidelines
TBD
• Finding 8: Citizen Science
Activities should estimate the signal-to-noise ratio for the observed Citizen Science data.
• Finding 9: Building common language and creating culture of open science
All the above-defined actions (imperatives and frontiers) in the Strategic Goals will promote the building of common language and creating culture of open science.
• Finding 10: Ethical perspectives of the data
TBD
• Finding 11: Use Case: Harmonization of Tsunami Data and Warning Processes
3.2.3 WP1- Management-led Cross disciplinary activities
Throughout the COOPEUS project, the COOPEUS management has initiated activities with the overall goal to improve the collaboration and data-exchange among environmental workshops RIs by through bringing awareness towards specific pressing challenges and initiating a discussion in the community.
Workshops:
COOPEUS held 4 workshops with the overall goal of engaging the broader environmental research infrastructure community in the work of COOPEUS, and thereby more broadly improve the awareness of the challenges the research infrastructure community faces in regards to data discoverability, data availability and data accessibility of environmental data
1) Strategic workshop on future harmonization of data sharing among – a joint workshop from COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT; EGU 2013. The workshop aimed at identifying and prioritizing future challenges and impediments for data-sharing globally among environmental research infrastructures in a short-term as well as a long-term perspective. The following 3 topics were on the agenda; PIDs; Synergies and Future RI landscape. The first topic was so well received and the discussions so intense that it led to a new workshop in Bremen on PIDs (see below) and eventually an initiation of a working group under RDA.
2) Joint COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT workshop on persistent digital identifiers (PID) for open time series data, Bremen, MARUM June 2013 (2 days). A major prerequisite for the proper use of persistent identifiers (PID) e.g. within data citations, is the persistence of both, identifiers as well as the integrity of the associated data set. This poses questions when PIDs are to be used for unfinished data sets or open time series data. The workshop participants discussed and compared solutions currently used in some major European research infrastructures with the overall goal to find a best practice solution for the usage of PIDs for open time series data. As an outcome 9 golden rules were formulated for the use of PIDs for open time series data. Furthermore, the workshop resulted in the formation of a new RDA working group targeting PID issues
3) A 2-day Hands-on Workshop about registering and accessing resources from COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) was held in BREMEN in July 2014. This workshop had a significant impact. COOPEUS views the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) as an important platform promoting cross-disciplinary approaches in the studies of multifaceted environmental challenges, and the research infrastructures in COOPEUS are currently in the process of registering their resources and services within the GCI. The workshop revealed that data policies of the individual RIs can often be the first impediment for their use of the GCI. Through hands-on exercises registering resources from the COOPEUS RIs, the first steps were taken to implement the GCI as a platform for documenting the capabilities of the COOPEUS RIs. Recommendations from the workshop participants revealed that in order to attract research infrastructures to use the GCI, the registration process must be simplified and accelerated. The resource registration and feedback by COOPEUS partners can play an important role in these efforts. As a result of this workshop, a specific COOPEUS registry over available COOPEUS services was initiated at the GEOSS GCI. The lessons from the workshop were presented at AGU2014 and GEOSS workshop in Copenhagen 2015. A full report on the outcome of the workshop was circulated to GEOSS. This report is available on the COOPEUS webpage (http://www.coopeus.eu/workshop-report/).
4) A Joint COOPEUS/ODIP workshop on connecting research infrastructures through brokering services – EGU2014 Vienna on. The workshop aiming a debate on the role of brokering services in the future RI-landscape. The workshop was initiated by an inspiring keynote talk by Stefano Nativi Head of CNR-IIA Unit in Florence, Italian National Research Council. In general, the audience embrace the use of brokers both the improved connectivity between research infrastructure and due to the improved data discoverability that is generated.
Through these workshops COOPEUS as contributed to continued discussion and development of the environmental research infrastructure community.
ILEAPS newsletter
In order to engage an ever larger community, COOPEUS was initiator of a special issue of the iLEAPS-newsletter on the environmental Research infrastructure landscape. Ketil Koop-Jakobsen from COOPEUS was guest editor on the production, which presented many of the Research infrastructures in COOPEUS as well as RI-projects including an article specifically on COOPEUS. Furthermore, the newsletter included interview articles targeting the integration of environmental RIs across borders as well as across scientific disciplines. The Newsletter was printed in 3000 copies, electronic versions as well as hard-copies was mail to regular subscribers of the iLEAPS newsletter and handed out at Conferences, meetings and workshops. The Newsletter is available from the iLEAPS homepage and from the COOPEUS website (http://www.coopeus.eu/ileaps-newsletter-special-issue-on-research-infrastructures/)
Potential Impact:
1 COOPEUS Impact statement:
1.1 COOPEUS in the global context - WP8 Impact statement
In COOPEUS, WP8 had an overarching role generating the vision and mission for COOPEUS as well as analyzing the Research infrastructure landscape in which COOPEUS operates. COOPEUS WP8 here gives a statement on the impact of COOPEUS in a global context.
COOPEUS has been active in interacting with a large group of institutions, initiatives and projects, special attention has been given to the liaison activities with GEO – GEOSS, Research Date Alliance and Belmont Forum’s environmental data management and e-infrastructure activity. COOPEUS is now recognized platform for global collaboration among environmental research infrastructures in the global context.
Many of the liaison and collaboration activities has been shared with other COOPEUS Work Packages, e.g. WP7 has successfully organized a hand-on GEOSS workshop and each of the thematic WPs (WP2-6) have been active in their own science domain. The WP8 interactions with other initiatives have been focused on communication via Strategic Cooperation Board and on ensuring the COOPEUS partners are well-presented in the relevant international data interoperability activities. For example, COOPEUS project coordinator Christoph Waldmann have been the member of the Steering Committee and Sanna Sorvari and Jean-Daniel Paris have been members of the general assembly of the Belmont Forum’s initiative on data management and e-infrastructures. In addition, several members (e.g. Ari Asmi, Robert Hubert) of the COOPEUS project are leading or active members of the RDA working Groups. Sorvari is also a Scientific Committee member of the ICSU – World Data System that is also relevant actor for promoting international data interoperability.
For the future international collaboration, the COOPEUS governance structure is designed to adapt to accommodate other international initiatives and organizations that have expressed strong interest in becoming part of COOPEUS. In particular, wider collaboration with Canada, Australia, Asian, and circumpolar organizations is foreseen. Many of the COOPEUS partners have already international collaboration and are moving towards deeper international work, and COOPEUS enables the coordination and communication platform for this international activities. The Strategic Cooperation board in COOPEUS has drafted a set of COOPEUS Guidelines for Engaging New Partners. This document describes some basic principles to guide engagement with new entities as well as a few simple processes to follow. The goal for the principles is to ensure that new partners are aligned with the COOPEUS mission and approach.
In addition, with the international collaboration COOPEUS is able to ask new questions for scientific and societal importance that;
• Span cross-disciplines that have not been able to be asked previously.
• Make cross-continental comparisons. That is to say, we will be able to compare, contrast, understand, and predict the underlying processes of environment change. For example, we know that the inception and development of drought in China, Australia, US and Europe differ, but we do not understanding the underlying processes and the feedback to food security.
• Include exogenous drivers, teleconnections outside our continental-to-cross continental boundaries that affect the environmental processes therein (i.e. synchrony, the spatial and temporal connectivity of one ecological event that contributes to other ecological processes). A common example is how El Niño oscillations control and telecommunicate climate patterns across large regions of the earth affecting ecological processes. In other words, in an ever increasingly connected global world, the environmental horizons need to look beyond classic boarders to examine causal processes, particularly in light of changing synoptic climate, new migrations, and human mediated changes in mass and energy flows.
Lastly and importantly, the success of COOPEUS in meeting its strategic goals and acting as a node in the global context is only ensured by adequate support and resources – both human and funding.
1.2 Individual WPs impact statements:
The individual COOPEUS work packages made a significant impact within their scientific domains.
1.2.1 WP2 Impact Space Weather EISCAT – AMISR
The main impact from Work Package 2 comes from the Roadmap for collaborations in incoherent scatter radar operations. The roadmap is the result from a collaboration between EISCAT and its US counterparts, but the idea is that its recommendations should be of general value for all operators of incoherent scatter radar facilities world-wide. The contents of this roadmap include many aspects of data formats and access because of the trend for incoherent scatter radar observations to become increasingly more data intensive, and accordingly the suggestions in the roadmap are in line with the capabilities and standards followed by e-infrastructure providers that have the experience needed for transferring and storing large data volumes. The suggested solutions are also both technologically and economically realistic for any incoherent scatter radar operator, and they are scalable so that future, potentially larger and more data intensive, systems also could benefit from consulting this roadmap. The roadmap is also consistent with the requirements and expectations of the users of the radar facilities.
The completion of this roadmap is timed very well since EISCAT Scientific Association is planning to build a large new incoherent scatter radar system, EISCAT_3D, within the next couple of years. That facility will be a defining radar system for the future thanks to its versatile capabilities, and thus it needs to be ensured that it is designed in a consistent way. This will provide the potential of interoperability with other radar systems, through harmonisation, and define future standards for ISR facilities to follow.
The annual EISCAT_3D User Meetings in Uppsala, Sweden, have been invaluable as a way to anchor the conclusions from Work Package 2 of the COOPEUS project with the EISCAT user community. Different aspects of the project were presented at three of the meetings (2013 – 2015) and very fruitful discussions on the topics of harmonisation and interoperability took place. Similarly, a presentation and a following discussion took place at the EISCAT international symposium in Lancaster, UK, in 2013, involving a wider range of audience. The data aspects of the ISR roadmap were presented and discussed at a workshop dedicated to ISR data issues in Kiruna, Sweden, in 2015, where the participants represented a broad expertise in ISR systems, data storage, grid computing and experimental setup. Finally, results from this Work Package were also presented at the AGU fall meeting in 2014 for an international audience.
1.2.2 WP3 IMPACT:
COOPEUS WP3 activities were framed by preexisting collaborations, historically between Europe and the US, but also more globally toward Asian/Pacific countries, Africa, etc. As a result the COOPEUS legacy will be in the establishment of dialogue about sharing views and objectives as a global community. Research Infrastructures and networks, however, will remain different and relying, on one side, on the international programs (WMO, FLUXNET, etc) and pressure of user communities as a force toward harmonization, and on the other side, on the national funding sources which tend to impose differentiation in data policies.
ICOS, AmeriFlux and NEON have profited a lot out of the COOPEUS project during its lifetime and will sustain the achievements also afterwards in a future collaborative approach. The GEO Carbon flagship initiative and the WMO IG3IS initiation are the essential fora for future discussions at the global level on Carbon observations and their link to carbon research.
The short- and long-term view includes
• Strengthening existing networks and their interaction, and creating new networks of scientists, leaders and users that will continue well beyond the lifetime of the project, through the long term research infrastructures coordination offices
• Reinforce and improve the cooperation transatlantic between European and US Research infrastructure in the field of Carbon Greenhouse Gases, through joint activities and participation to global coordination initiatives in particular including users
• Speed up the development of a common vision for the next decades that could help the parallel development of the RIs
• Lay foundations for harmonized data policies and a better documentation of the data lifecycle across the Atlantic and disseminate policy-relevant information on global carbon cycle and GHG
• Emerge global initiatives, e.g.; through the GEO Carbon flagship initiative, led by ICOS, which aims at providing more inclusive coordination among the main actors monitoring carbon cycle and GHG at global level to further develop inter-operability between in-situ infrastructures and networks by data harmonization (data and metadata formats), further development of full and open data sharing, and Long-term sustainability of data centers and model result repository.
• Strengthen the elaboration of standards through international organization such as WMO and with the national metrological institutes (who have already an intl platform: BIPM)
• Implementation of COOPEUS outcome in regard to cross-disciplinary data exchange will be enforced through the promotion of enhanced metadata and data discovery to meet users needs (metadata standardization, technical aspects: web services, xml documentation, etc.), e.g.; through ENVRI+
1.2.3 WP4 impact statement
COPEUS has leveraged international scientific cooperation in some sectors of the Ocean Observation RIs creating a common ground for the RI’s development which will be extended to other non-EU countries and will facilitate the birth of a real global network of RIs able to address Global environmental challenges for the societal benefit. While Marine RIs together with the other Environmental RIs have the mission to address continental-scale and global Challenges, COOPEUS has contributed to increasing the awareness that these challenges call for RIs joining the forces across the world.
A straightforward large impact of the COOPEUS Ocean Observation component is about consciousness that the joint use of the RIs data is essential to face grand environmental challenges and that this implies adopting data management schemes according to shared principles, to improve the usefulness of global platforms like GEOSS, to adopt common policies for the full data cycle, to work on common techniques for data collection and quality assurance, and to constantly exchange and update best practices for design and development of remote components.
A major impact is obviously related to the advancement of knowledge of ocean processes which is the condition to make steps toward solutions to the most compelling challenges. A world-class framework of collaboration where such challenges can be discussed and analyzed, where global research projects and programs can be prepared, and where a new generation of scientists are fostered, with a wider and more realistic vision of the relations among the ocean environmental processes.
1.2.4 WP5 Impact statement
The integration of solid Earth science infrastructures in EU and US will have a profound and positive long-term effect on the infrastructure panorama in Europe and the US, bringing together the main classes of infrastructures covering different aspects of monitoring and geo-hazard and risk assessment under a single program, as well as expanding the access to and collection of multidisciplinary data in the domain of Earth sciences. The interoperability of multidisciplinary data and computational research infrastructures will accelerate scientific research and information gathering based on big data research, through the development of standards and concepts for data discovery, information access and computational research environments.
The EPOS and EarthScope RI infrastructures interoperability provide to the constructing of a coordinated and broadly oriented seismological observational infrastructure, by integrating a wide diversity of seismological networks and data centers with FDSN as coordinating organization. The coordination and implementation of multi-disciplinary data service facilities involving a distributed, but integrated, set of data archives, including innovative and standardized service facilities for the research community.
1.2.5 WP6 Impact statement
Regarding the use of bilateral cooperation to speed up developing a common vision for the next decades, identifying existing gaps and creating the opportunities to better face global environmental challenges, the initial fact finding and analysis phase included the distribution and analysis of questionnaires to the biodiversity research community, followed by a successful meeting organized in Madrid in September 2013 joining experts from EU and US.
Reinforcing cooperation between the EC and the US in the field of environmental research infrastructure was further supported with the visit from EU-LifeWatch researchers to US-NEON facilities in October 2013, in the framework of the COOPEUS Annual Meeting, the participation in two splinter meetings at EGU meetings (2013, 2014) , and in an AGU Fall Meeting (2014).
Scientific data management was reviewed following the ideas from the DataOne initiative, that were further discussed under the light of the RDA discussions (Dublin, Amsterdam 2014, and Paris 2015), and also the development of common policies for the full data life cycle, that are been finally implemented in the LifeWatch pilot e-infrastructure in Spain (the ideas analyzed under COOPEUS have been included in the tender documents currently being implemented by companies like Telefonica, Fujitsu and GMV Engineering).
Also, regarding the strengthening development of a consistent and dynamic European policy for environmental research infrastructure, their data and beyond, the ideas discussed at COOPEUS have been propagated to the EGI LifeWatch Competence Center being implemented under the EGI-Engage H2020 project, started in March 2015. They are also being considered in the WP2 of the new H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud, where Task 2.2 is explicitly oriented to cover the data management issues, with the participation of two COOPEUS partners, CSIC and INGV.
The impact on advance basic knowledge and on the management of natural hazards and preservation of the environment will come from new projects and proposals: the IRVNE proposal covered these two topics, by addressing the theme of phenology related to allergies, so exploiting the Global Case Study developed in COOPEUS, and also the management of flash-flooding events in the Mediterranean basin. New proposals, also oriented to the use of structural funds in Europe under the RIS-3 directive, will be launched in the coming months.
1.2.6 WP7 Impact statement
A key factor for the successful work of work package seven was the close cooperation with major other European projects such as ENVRI and EUDAT as well as the cooperation with international standardisation authorities and organisations such as GEOSS and RDA. Much of the results of WP7 have been communicated during meetings and workshops in cooperation or on invitation of these initiatives such as the joint ‘COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT strategic workshop on future harmonization of data sharing among Research Infrastructures’ in Vienna, April 2013, the ‘COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT workshop on persistent digital identifiers (PID) for open time series data’ was held in Bremen, in June 2013 or the ‘Hands-on Workshop for registering and accessing COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)’ which took place in Bremen, summer 2014, and during the EUDAT conference 2013 and 2014.
In general, results have been presented annually on both sides of the Atlantic during dedicated sessions and meeting at the major geoscientific events, the AGU as well as EGU. Thus COOPEUS reached a large number of key persons which are able to disseminate COOPEUS results within their community. Further COOPEUS could reach key stakeholders and focus groups via direct interaction with RDA within their working group on digital identifiers as well as by our close cooperation with the GEOSS SIF on the advancement of the GEOSS CSR and the fruitful cooperation with EUDAT and ENVRI on the issue of persistent identifiers. A major success of COOPEUS WP7 was the provision of a large number of RI services and data resources entries for the GEOSS registry resulting in a global visibility and searchability of these resources via the GEOSS portal.
A key result of COOPEUS is the joint core data policy, which successfully harmonised existing data policies of all involved research infrastructures on both sides of the Atlantic. The data policy has been used to amend RI data policies and was influential for the definition of the data policy of the FP7 RI project FixO3. The COOPEUS data policy strongly supports the spirit of Open Access. Thus, COOPEUS has reached strong impact on the accessibility and openness of data delivered by a significant number of globally leading environmental research infrastructures.
Core concepts of COOPEUS standardisation approach was published within an article in iLeaps Newsletter mentioned earlier. The joint work on PIDs for dynamic time series resulted in a white paper as well as a peer reviewed journal publication. Some of our core ideas are now taken up by groups at RDA but also within a dedicated working group of EUDAT as well as the continuation project of ENVRI (ENVRIPLUS) and have inspired DataCite, which aim to implement some of our concepts within the H2020 project THOR.
List of Websites:
www.coopeus.eu
Much more than any other organizational form, research infrastructures appear to be the natural choice for establishing sustainable links across geoscience disciplines. They are meant to serve the needs of their users and typically offer standard services including data variable in space and time. However, environmental research by its very nature is very diverse as it embraces quite different scientific disciplines and makes use of a variety of different observational methods. These circumstances result in the effect that data coming from different observing systems even in the same region cannot directly be used to form a holistic picture of the observed environment, as the technical requirements/conditions on the observed parameters often differ significantly. From that perspective integrating research infrastructures from different fields is posing an enormous challenge. However, if the integration process is not started now the situation is bound to become more complex in the coming years. Based on these insights, COOPEUS has been put on track to cross-link research infrastructures that reached a certain maturity level by integrating existing data and information systems, and finally facilitate a common understanding of basic architectures, services, and products as a base for facilitating data and information exchange.
At the current stage, the immediate benefits for individual scientists from cross-linking research infrastructures are often difficult to identify. In cross-cutting topics, for example; volcanic ashes changing the biochemistry of ocean waters which affects primary production are not prime topics of research, but lie more in the monitoring realm. In COOPEUS, the tool to demonstrate the benefits from cross-linking research infrastructures was the concept of user scenarios, which was used to stimulate discussions and assist in the process of highlighting the benefits. In COOPEUS, the user scenario on Tsunami detection systems was a prime example, which gave significant insights into the benefits of cross linking research infrastructures.
On the European and the international level, a number of initiatives have started to tackle the issue of cross-cutting scientific challenges in regards to improving the cross-disciplinary data sharing. For these initiatives to make significant progress, it is important that they build on existing knowledge and experience already available. The COOPEUS project has analyzed and described the international environmental research infrastructure landscape as it is today, and produced a roadmap for future collaborative initiatives in the field of environmental research infrastructures. This provides a guideline for the collaborative actions of the COOPEUS community, but is relevant for all environmental research infrastructure initiatives.
One major actor in the environmental research infrastructure landscape is GEOSS, and COOPEUS recognize GEOSS as the only truly global multidisciplinary platform for the integration of environmental data, although GEOSS may not always perfectly suit for the mission of the individual research infrastructures. COOPEUS explored the use of GEOSS common infrastructure as a platform for registering the resources of the individual research infrastructures in COOPEUS. This resulted a number of valuable practical as well as intellectual lessons, which was formulated in a close collaboration between COOPEUS and GEOSS.
COOPEUS has also initiated collaborations with other initiatives such as the Belmont Forum E-Infrastructure initiative, and EarthCube in the US that aims at greatly increasing the productivity and capability of researchers working at the frontiers of Earth system science. Furthermore, the COOPEUS project received significant attention and guidance from funding agencies, and as a result many of the actions started under COOPEUS will survive beyond the lifetime of the project implemented in new initiatives. For example is the development of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and the further development of the concept of user scenarios displayed as one of the key recommendations in the Belmont forum e-infrastructure final report, which demonstrates the impact that COOPEUS had in this domain.
Project Context and Objectives:
The road to COOPEUS
The idea of strengthening the interaction between research infrastructures in the field of environmental science was born out of a discussion between the European Commission and the National Science Foundation. EC and NSF have decided to support European and US cooperation projects addressing interoperability of environmental research infrastructures across the Atlantic. As a concrete action, a workshop had been organized in September 2011 in Brussels where all relevant stakeholders from both sides of the Atlantic were invited to present their views and ideas. The objective of this workshop was to identify actions for a better integration (both thematic and cross-cutting) of existing Research Infrastructure initiatives in the US and EU. The integration should encompass the coordination of scientific themes as well as facilitating better interoperability of the technical infrastructures, and thereby lay the foundation for a truly global observation system of systems. More specifically, the EC had already concrete plans for implementing these objectives by publishing a call for projects that should develop EU/US common data policies and data standards in the field of environmental research, in particular related to space weather facilities, atmospheric observatories, ocean observatories, tectonics-related observatories, facilities for research on biodiversity and ecosystems. The project should assist in the creation of a long-term sustainable framework (i.e. addressing the full life cycle of data) for the coordination of actions at global level, as well as address interoperability (including compliance with GEOSS principles), harmonization of data formats, data validation and curation.
The COOPEUS objectives
As a consequence of these considerations, the COOPEUS project was developed following the basic idea of focusing on data sharing addressing all related technical requirements in regard to data interoperability. Although the objectives of the project can be phrased in a simple way, the implementation proofed to be quite complex. Therefore, a project structure had to be defined in a way that took the needs of the research infrastructures as well as the idea of data sharing across different disciplines into account. The lifetime of the project was essentially split into two parts starting out by fostering interoperability across the Atlantic for the individual research infrastructures working in the same scientific domains. In the second phase, by introducing user scenarios, data sharing across disciplines should be facilitated.
What was not known during the proposal writing phase was to what extent the mission profiles of the involved research infrastructures actually match. The importance of that became clear during the course of the project as the mission statement of the individual research infrastructures have massive consequences for the data policies, i.e. the relationship to the scientific users and also for the technical implementation of the data infrastructure. It also trickles down to the level where data are generated and disseminated.
Another insight that evolved during the course of the project was the importance of describing the landscape that COOPEUS is acting in and defining its role. This was one of the early tasks that had been addressed by the consortium as all research infrastructures are operating as part of a bigger network meaning that they are also contributing to other programs. These will be explained in more detail in the following section on related initiatives.
Besides addressing interoperability COOPEUS has been striving to demonstrate interworkability meaning the use of processing tools across disciplines. One example of this idea was the engagement of IRIS that mainly deals with land based seismic measurements as part of the OOI ocean related data infrastructure. It offered the opportunity to learn about the methods that are used to analyze time series data.
Related environmental research infrastructure initiatives
Some information about related programs and initiatives shall be presented here, the full environmental research landscape analysis can be found in the COOPEUS road map report. The first and most important program is EarthCube, which consists of a number of projects that all addressed similar issues of data sharing and interoperability across disciplines as in COOPEUS. In some cases funding coming from EarthCube could be used synergistically for pursuing COOPEUS goals although most of the funding of our US partners came out of the NSF SAVI program (Science Across Virtual Institutes). The synchronization of funding was rather difficult to achieve and during the first year of COOPEUS there was no direct funding for our US partners available. At the moment the situation has reversed – the funding for COOPEUS stopped while the US still continues to receive funds. From the beginning of 2016, the COOPEUS mission in Europe will continue under the H2020-funded project COOP+, which was developed based on the experience and knowledge gathered in the COOPEUS project.
Furthermore, COOPEUS partners have engaged in an initiative by the Belmont Forum. Starting in October 2013, the Belmont Forum E-Infrastructures and Data Management Collaborative Research Action aimed at bringing together domain scientists, computer and information scientists, and other experts from more than 14 countries to establish recommendations on how the Belmont Forum can implement a more coordinated, holistic, and sustainable approach to the funding and support of global environmental change research. The coordinator of COOPEUS was engaged in this Belmont Forum initiative as member of the steering group and leading the work package on “Harmonization of Global Data Infrastructures for sharing environmental information”. Conclusions were drawn from a series of collaborative scoping activities conducted as part of an extensive 18-month international review on the state of global data management, networking, computing, legal issues and governance. The Belmont Forum e-infrastructure initiative has been seen as a natural follow-up to the work started in COOPEUS, and some of the COOPEUS ideas like the set-up of user scenarios had been taken up.
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is designed to build the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society. The Research Data Alliance works through focused Working Groups and Interest Groups, formed of experts from around the world – from academia, industry and government. It was started in 2013 by a core group of interested agencies – the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation. RDA was launched in March 2013. COOPEUS partners are involved with a number of working groups. As an example, the RDA working group on PIDs for time-series data was launched at a COOPEUS workshop on PIDs. In this way, some of the initiatives coming from COOPEUS will continue using the RDA as a platform.
The data integration task that COOPEUS was aiming for has a lot of overlaps with the goals of GEOSS. Therefore, it has been a natural decision to build up closer links in particular to the group that works on the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). A joint COOPEUS-GEOSS workshop was organized in 2014 with a participation of the GEO secretariat and members of the GCI group. The workshop highlighted the benefits for the RIs obtained by registering resources in the GCI. The workshop also provided significant insight into the need for specific development that the GCI must undergo in order to facilitate easy registration of resources and thereby be attractive to environmental research infrastructures.
A number of other collaborative research infrastructure projects have been running in parallel with COOPEUS. COOPEUS has worked closely with many of them; in particular ODIP, ENVRI, EUDAT and iCORDI.
COOPEUS research infrastructures and their outcome of COOPEUS
COOPEUS involved a very diverse group of environmental research infrastructures. The infrastructures were paired up based on the scientific disciplines they cover. In this way, each of the following disciplines; Space weather, Carbon observation, Ocean observation, Solid Earth observation and Biodiversity were represented by at least 2 Research infrastructures in COOPEUS; 1 from EU and 1 from USA. A short overview of the involved research infrastructures and their objectives is given here (based on the roadmap report):
EISCAT- AMISR (Space Weather)
Within this project EISCAT and the US partner AMISR have coordinated their collaboration in the field of observing incoherent scattering events. The goal was to establish a joint global user community with actions including education, data exploitation, technology planning and joint technical workshops, as well as coordinated observation programs. Starting from a joint set of data practices and from a joint roadmap the partners aimed to ultimately explore joint financing opportunities for future consortia, which would be responsible for new facilities which are part of the developing global RI.
ICOS- NEON (Carbon observation)
Both ICOS and NEON aim at observing carbon oxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere while NEON additionally is addressing biodiversity as well. Accordingly, a link to LifeWATCH exists as well. Because of the fragmentation of the measurement activities, the comparability of the data acquired in the two continents were questionable and resulted in an increased level of uncertainty in cross-continental analysis. This situation was partly mitigated by global initiatives such as WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch and FluxNet, where experts met and compared their data. The research infrastructures ICOS and NEON created more recently a new situation whereby data and metadata formats had been standardized, at least at the regional level (US, Europe). As part of COOPEUS these activities had been continued and definite agreements were achieved.
EPOS- IRIS and UNAVCO (Solid Earth Dynamics)
In the COOPEUS project the partners had deliberately been focusing on coordinating and developing the two most advanced RI’s elements, seismology and geodesy, creating the critical mass for a global advanced earth science IT architecture. In this context the EarthCube discussions, accompanied by very similar discussions within many different projects and initiatives within the EPOS community had been very timely.
EMSO- OOI (Ocean observation)
The transatlantic coordination on ocean observatory programs through COOPEUS has aimed at the seamless integration of existing observing systems into a common data framework to allow for an efficient and widespread use of the data and information on the world’s oceans. Right from the beginning it was clear that a Tsunami user scenario would be a good concept to pursue as it immediately lends itself to combing terrestrial and ocean based observations. This User-scenario was conducted under COOPEUS and gave valuable insight into the practical challenges associated with connecting research infrastructures to work on a specific and immediate challenge with great societal impact; in this case, the establishment of a Tsunami detection system.
LifeWATCH- DataONE and NEON (Biodiversity)
Within the biodiversity community in COOPEUS; a joint scientific agenda as a driver for common research infrastructure development was produced and implementation plans for data and related processing tools have been agreed upon. A roadmap and implementation plan towards common cross-Atlantic services from cooperating infrastructures in the area of biodiversity and ecosystem research was generated.
Project Results:
1 Foreword
Understanding and addressing the great environmental challenges of the world today relies on information on a very diverse set of data types from different scientific fields that range over ecosystem production, carbon budgets, biodiversity, geodesy and seismology, and ocean and atmospheric circulation. Cross-disciplinary discoverability, availability and accessibility to these kinds of data from all available sources are essential for basic research as well as providing understanding for societal benefit. In the past three years, the COOPEUS project has investigated ways to overcome impediments for data sharing and exchanges among environmental research infrastructures from very different scientific disciplines ranging from space weather over biodiversity to solid earth dynamics. In this work, COOPEUS have provided guidelines for a better integration of existing environmental research infrastructures.
The initial work of COOPEUS focused on identifying gaps and commonalities among COOPEUS-involved research infrastructures in their ways of making data available e.g. via internet accessible databases and data policies. The outcome of this analysis paved the way for the collaborative cross disciplinary work of the second period of COOPEUS, which has focused on identifying concrete actions to improve discoverability, availability and accessibility of data from COOPEUS RIs across scientific disciplines.
Cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work packages
The COOPEUS project brought together the scientists involved in Europe’s major environmental related research infrastructures or infrastructure projects, i.e. EISCAT, EPOS, LifeWATCH, EMSO, and ICOS, with their respective US counterparts that are responsible for the NSF-funded projects; AMISR, EARTHSCOPE, DataONE, OOI and NEON. The intention is that by interlinking these activities new synergies and best practices are generated between the RIs across the Atlantic. The work of COOPEUS can be divided into two categories; the interdisciplinary work and the Cross disciplinary work. Here we shall describe the S & T results/foregrounds of the individual workpackages 2-6 (interdisciplinary) focusing on the improvement of the transatlantic collaboration within a specific scientific discipline as well as workpackages 7 and 8 (Cross-disciplinary) supported by COOPEUS management WP1 focusing on improving transatlantic collaboration between environmental RIs across scientific disciplines.
2 Achievements summary:
2.1 Summary - Interdisciplinary work (WP2-WP6):
Work packages 2-6 (interdisciplinary) focused on the improvement of the transatlantic collaboration within specific scientific disciplines, namely; Space weather (WP2), Carbon Observations (WP3), Ocean Observations (WP4), Solid earth dynamics (WP5) and Biodiversity (WP6).
WP2 focussed on creating an efficient international environment for collaborative studies in the area of atmospheric radar studies. The main infrastructures involved in WP2 were EISCAT (EU) and AMISR (US). The main effort was initially made in two different areas: the coordination of observational programmes and the standardisation of data formats with the purpose to simplify interoperability between the different international incoherent scatter radar systems. These activities were finalised by the preparation of a roadmap for international collaborations in incoherent scatter radar operations. This roadmap has been presented to the incoherent scatter radar community and has been accepted as a good starting point for future collaborations.
WP3 focused on Carbon observations and improving the collaboration between key-research infrastructures involved with various kinds of carbon data. The main infrastructures involved in WP3 were ICOS (EU) and NEON (US)
The main achievements were:
• MoUs were signed over the course of the project between ICOS ATC and NOAA-GMD and between ICOS ETC and both NEON and LBNL for AmeriFlux
• Bringing together scientific leaders of carbon research on issues of interoperability and data policy harmonization for users as well as identifying data policy gaps.
• Identifying and prioritizing user-driven vs tech-driven expression of requirements focusing on user’s requirements such easy and open data access, no delays in data release and stability in formats.
• Bringing together current and future EU and US data users to better assess emerging needs for interoperability (ICOS-NEON Carbon training workshops)
• Training early career scientists to write common (EU-US) projects with common Data Management Plans
• RI processes harmonization: harmonizing common data processing chain and variables definition between ICOS and AmeriFlux.
• Providing a fertile ground for the emergence of international initiatives: GEO Carbon flagship, and the WMO initiative IG3IS
• Expansion of the harmonization and standardization concepts and agreements outside the cross-Atlantic domain, including for example Brazilian and Chinese ecosystem networks
WP4 focused on Oceans observations and improving the collaboration between key-research infrastructures involved with various kinds of ocean data. The main infrastructures involved in WP4 were EMSO (EU) and OOI (US). WP4 has explored the facilitation of a network of RIs that are engaged in designing specific science experiments and observational strategies for ocean observatories.
COOPEUS provided the framework for the establishment of a network of Ocean Observation Research Infrastructures under development across the North Atlantic. A main outcome of the project is the formation of a group of key experts from Europe and USA that have now matured strong contacts for a long-lasting collaboration and have set the foundation for expanding a structured relationship. Though COOPEUS was initially limited to EU-US partnerships, a Canadian team from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) was considered a valuable and natural additional partner in the collaboration. The Solid Earth expertise from the corresponding COOPEUS WPs participant institutions were included for the disciplinary sector of seismology and for the dissemination of ocean network seismological data to the wider community of seismologists.
The members of the trans-Atlantic team are:
EMSO: Laura Beranzoli, Mairi Best, Francesco Chierici, Davide Embriaco, Paolo Favali, John Picard, Massimiliano Rossi, Nevio Zitellini
OOI: Robert Weller, Nan Galbraith, Deborah Kelly, Oscar Scofield, Scott Glenn, John Delaney, John Orcutt
ONC: Martin Heesemann, Martin Scherwath, Benoit Pirenne, Tania Insua
IRIS: Tim Ahern
UNAVCO: Chuck Meertens
The experts’ network developed around consensus subjects
- Technological: seafloor seismological data flowing in real-time in monitoring and warning systems, harmonization of metadata catalogues across the RIs for data interoperability
- Scientific: real time joint analysis of bottom pressure and seismological data and use of GPS data jointly with pressure data to improve the reliability of early detection and recognition of tsunami waves.
Due to the novelty of these research infrastructures, and development in the comprehension of socially important natural processes, it is expected that these areas can hopefully benefit from a robust and comprehensive framework of best practices developed by the trans-atlantic collaboration founded in COOPEUS.
The User Scenario approach has been very fruitful, and was demonstrated to be appropriate to strengthen the link between counterpart RIs on both sides of the Atlantic. The selected user scenario ‘Tsunami dynamics and Early Warning Systems for Near Source Areas (Mediterranean, Juan de Fuca)’ was considered of interest with respect to the type of the natural risks threatening socio-economic developed and densely populated areas and given the maturity of knowledge and practice. The use case, directly involving components of the participating Research Infrastructures has been and will be a real work environment to make the collaboration grow based on sustained data/metadata sharing and interoperability.
Tangible outcomes of the success of the collaboration was the formation of a partnership including some of the institutions and main actors of COOPEUS and the ability to submit a new project proposal, namely COOP_Plus - Cooperation of Research Infrastructures to address global challenges in the environment field under the Call H2020-INFRASUPP-2014-2. The proposal was positively ranked and the announcement of funding approval by EC was communicated at the time of this report preparation. COOPEUS_Plus will expand the international collaboration to other world-class RIs and will delivered a roadmap for the collaborative activities.
WP5 coordinated the long-term integration plans for solid Earth science envisioned by EPOS (European Plate Observing System) in Europe and EarthScope in the US, ensuring interoperability through the frameworks recommended by GEO (SS). These long-term integration plans for solid Earth science infrastructures specifically aim at the interoperability of multidisciplinary data and computational research infrastructures through the development of standards and concepts for data discovery, information access and computational research environments.
The current, most advanced infrastructures within Earth sciences, seismology and geodesy, are continuously evolving towards a sustainable, global, interconnected infrastructure with the goals to efficiently explore distributed, big data archives and to provide novel services and computational frameworks to the research communities. Different on-going projects and initiatives within both EU and US are focussing on specific domains, geographical regions and specialized building blocks to be implemented in these infrastructures.
Global coordination requires a solid framework on a regional scale encompassing different disciplines. The US program EarthScope is a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that deploys thousands of seismic, GPS, and other geophysical instruments to study the structure and evolution of the North American continent and the processes the cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It involves collaboration between scientists, educators, policy makers, and the public to learn about and utilize exciting scientific discoveries as they are being made. The European EC H2020 program EPOS-IP is the long-term plan for the integration of national and transnational Research Infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe to provide seamless access to data, services and facilities. Continuous coordination on both regional scales (EU, US) and between EU and US project leaders, scientists and developers provided the framework for interoperability in services within and between, in particular, the seismological and geodetic domains. COOPEUS provided the framework to coordinate, plan and implement various activities and developments within EU-US Earth Science infrastructures, and to share visions within EPOS (EU) and EarthScope (US) on data and cyber infrastructures, to align infrastructures and ensure long term interoperability.
WP6 focused on Biodiversity and was concerned with finding new and effective approaches for the scientific community based on the use of data and services in the EU and US Research Infrastructures. The main infrastructures involved in WP6 were LifeWATCH (EU) and NEON (US). In summary, the two most important achievements within WP6 are the following:
• Establishing clear collaboration paths between NEON and LifeWatch
• Identification of global challenges showing the need for cooperation among environmental RI dealing with biodiversity data at global level
These achievements have already significantly impacted the way new challenges are addressed in LifeWatch, and the user-scenario on the global carbon and phenology data conducted by WP6 illustrated the the ingredients required to address a global challenge, considering the point of view of interoperability, need to contrast and compare different models, data formats and operational procedures. The user-scenario can be considered as an example of how to setup a collaboration process among different Research Infrastructures from EU and US, from an initial idea to the implementation of a real Case Study addressing a global challenge
2.2 Summary – Cross-disciplinary work (WP7-WP8 + WP1)
The cross disciplinary collaboration is an essential aspect of COOPEUS. WP8 and WP7 were specifically dedicated to explore the synergies achieved through an improved cross-disciplinary interaction among environmental RIs. WP8 and WP7 received direct input from WP2-6, and as such the work of the cross disciplinary work packages 7 and 8 represents the views of the entire COOPEUS community.
WP7’s main objective was to set the technological and formal basis to improve interoperability and data exchange between RIs. The work package successfully harmonized RI data policies and provided a joint COOPEUS data policy, which strongly promotes the spirit of open access to data compliant with the relevant legislative frameworks. Based on a status quo assessment, WP7 further identified a set of core integrative standards, which are suitable for a sustainable future cross-discipline and Atlantic cooperation and improve data discovery as well as data exchange among EU and US RIs.
Both, the joint data policy and the initial suite of core standards were used to set up a joint standardization framework which was further improved by a series of practical tools, which include the already existing services and registries of GEOSS as well as an interoperability maturity assessment online tool. MoU templates to specify international cooperation between RIs in detail as well as the ‘joint standardization handbook’ further contribute to the COOPEUS framework for international collaboration among EU and US RIs.
WP8 synthesised joint COOPEUS community strategies, set priorities, selected COOPEUS case studies and prepared future roadmap and action plans with COOPEUS partner research infrastructures.WP8 aimed to develop common strategies and a joint framework for long-term EU-US cooperation on data interoperability and on interworkability of methods between environmental research infrastructures.
The most important achievement of the WP8 was the establishment of the COOPEUS roadmap for the next 10 year among the COOPEUS partner RIs. The roadmap outlines a list of actions that the COOPEUS partners have identified as the needed steps towards better transatlantic data interoperability among COOPEUS observatories/research infrastructures. In addition, the roadmap drafting process was an important activity for enhancing the community building, defining the common strategic messages and outlining the main dissemination activities.
WP1; COOPEUS management (WP1) supplemented the cross-disciplinary activities. WP1 held 4 workshops with the overall goal of involving the broader environmental research infrastructure community in the work of COOPEUS, and thereby more broadly improve the awareness of the challenges the research infrastructure community faces in regards to data discoverability, data availability and data accessibility of environmental data. The most important workshop was a Hands-on Workshop about registering and accessing resources from COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). This workshop was held jointly together with GEOSS and a valuable feedback loop between the COOPEUS users of the GCI and GEOSS was established at this workshop to the benefit of GEOSS as well as COOPEUS RIs.
Furthermore, in order to engage interest in the benefit and challenges associated with improving collaboration among environmental RIs to an even larger community, COOPEUS was initiator of a special issue of the iLEAPS-newsletter on the environmental Research infrastructure landscape. COOPEUS was guest editor on the production, which presented more than 10 articles introducing the work of many of the Research infrastructures in COOPEUS, also including an article specifically on COOPEUS. Furthermore COOPEUS personnel were interviewed about their work for an interview article.
3 Detailed description of main S & T results/foregrounds
The following will give a detailed description of the S&T results in the individual COOPEUS WPs.
3.1 S & T results/foregrounds of interdisciplinary workpackages
3.1.1 WP2: Space Weather; EISCAT (EU) and AMISR (USA)
WP-Leader: EISCAT
The objective of the activities in this work package was to create a sustainable global working environment in the incoherent scatter radar (ISR) community. In particular, the main aims were to harmonise the ISR data formats, to coordinate ISR observation programmes and to construct a roadmap to organise future efforts of ISR facilities on both sides of the Atlantic.
EISCAT and the US ISR counterparts have agreed to work towards standardised formats for ISR data. The different data levels used in the ISR systems worldwide were identified in a gap analysis, where it was clearly shown that ISR systems produce vast amounts of raw data that can be stored and transferred at different levels of reduction, but also that similarities exist at the fundamental level of data organisation at the different ISR facilities. These similarities allow a high degree of standardisation to be made, which would facilitate increased scientific cooperation between users of the different systems. The data levels were classified as follows:
• Data level 1 (RF signal voltage) represents the lowest accessible level of digital sampled and filtered data in the radio frequency (RF) voltage domain. The formats and rates of these data are system-specific and usually also depend on experimental configurations. These data are normally not stored except for some specialised applications where this level of data is required. Future systems, like EISCAT_3D, will perform much of their fundamental processing, such as beam-forming, digitally on level 1 data instead of in the analog receiver chains as is done in present systems.
• Data level 2 (correlated products) consists of correlated products produced by signal chain elements applying auto- and cross-correlation operations on level 1 data. Data of this level have traditionally been used for long-term storage by most current incoherent scatter radar systems.
• Data level 3 (plasma parameters) consist of the physical parameters describing the ionosphere that are derived from the level 2 data. Data of this level are by far the most requested data.
Since the level 1 data formats are system dependent to a very high degree and not normally subject to long-term storage, there has not yet been a need for any inter-system harmonisation at this data level. However, it was noted during Task 2.3 (EC/USA cooperation on incoherent data practices and formats) that it is useful for the development of new measurement and data analysis techniques to have the possibility to exchange level 1 data between different operators and systems. The HDF5 experience of AMISR and Millstone Hill has been identified as a starting point for discussions aimed at defining a common RF voltage format across the community.
Data level 2 has been the most common level for long time storage of incoherent scatter radar data, because at that level the data volume has been sufficiently reduced by the correlation to be manageable while it still retains sufficient information for further analysis to be made. For this reason it is also the data level that should be most suitable for data exchange purposes. However, there are no standardised formats today for level 2 data so this is an area where there is a great need for harmonisation. Common features of level 2 data formats between EISCAT and the US systems were identified and reported in COOPEUS Deliverable 2.2 (Gap Analysis Report) and they could function as a starting point for the definition of a common format for these data. Further work in this area is needed for this harmonisation to become reality.
The incoherent scatter radar community has a well-established data container for the storage of level 3 data as functions of space and time: the Madrigal distributed database system. Its development begun in 1980 at Millstone Hill and it is now the standard repository for all participating incoherent scatter radar data systems. Madrigal aims at using the standardised and flexible HDF5 format in future releases in order to remove some limitations inherent in the format.
A small set of use cases were proposed in Task 2.4 (Definition of potential case studies to harmonise standards and improve interoperability) in order to test the level of harmonisation and interoperability between EISCAT and the US ISR facilities:
• Low-level data interchange between EISCAT and US ISR facilities, using a common data format, and applying the local analysis software of the different facilities on the same data set. The results should then be compared and any differences between the results have to be analysed carefully.
• A collaborative international radar school should be arranged to educate in the use of both EISCAT and US ISR systems. The abilities of the students could later be tested by letting them change between facilities. This would also be a test of the interoperability of the radars.
• An integrated ionospheric image could be prepared by letting EISCAT and at least one US ISR facility operate together in response to a geophysical trigger. This would function both as a test of the protocols for the coordination of the ISR systems and of the harmonisation of the observation programmes.
• A real-time display of ionospheric conditions using data from both EISCAT and US ISR facilities on the same website could be prepared. This would require giving the Madrigal system access to the data earlier than is being done today. Depending on data policies, this will at the present be restricted to times when Common Programmes are running since this case study requires open data access.
• A parametrised risk factor, for instance for high altitude air travel, could be estimated by integrating data obtained by EISCAT and US ISR systems into an ionospheric model to perform now-casting. This requires looking into methods and protocols to export data into space weather services in a harmonised manner.
• A direct interchange of experimental setup is a straightforward test of interoperability of the systems. This involves running an experiment designed for one facility on another one.
Finally, a common approach to facility scheduling and operating procedures was developed in Task 2.5 (Construction of a joint atmospheric radar roadmap) in order to optimise the coordination of European and US ISR facilities at the operational and observational levels. This effort resulted in a roadmap for collaborations in incoherent scatter radar operations where a set of recommendations were identified for organisations operating ISR systems, and in addition also a set of recommendations on the facility level, both for planned new systems and for updates and upgrades of existing systems.
The organisation level recommendations are:
• Identify a sustainable arena that is suitable for discussions on international coordination.
• Follow the COOPEUS joint data policy.
• Work towards the introduction of persistent data identifiers.
• Agree on a level 2 data standard and make sure that it is suitable for long term storage.
• Make sure that the level 3 data produced are fit to be used in common data portals by connecting sufficient amount of meta-data.
• Prepare protocols for migration of data, both to new formats and new depositories.
• Open for possibilities to implement a common scheduling and operational philosophy.
• Continue the incoherent scatter world days planning as it is done now.
• Make sure that protocols exist for event-driven observations, where one facility/organisation can suggest operation of other facilities/organisations.
• Make efforts to expand the ISR community through high visibility and good connection to academic institutions.
• Identify projects for training and exchange of radar operating engineers.
• Continue the incoherent scatter radar summer schools.
• Identify projects for coordinating outreach efforts.
The facility level recommendations are:
• Aim for using harmonised level 1 data format for the internal data processing.
• Ensure that data migration activities follow strategy protocols.
• Use the ENVRI reference model as a guideline for the data framework.
• Ensure that standard operating modes are defined for producing long-term continuous data sets that can be used to observe ionospheric changes over time.
• Open for activities involving exchange of engineers for training purposes.
3.1.2 WP3: Carbon Observations; ICOS (EU) and NEON (USA)
WP-leader: CEA
The development of Research Infrastructures in Europe and US created a unique framework to develop common strategies and methods that will enhance measurements interoperability, reducing their uncertainty and stimulating future common EU-US research activities.
WP3 brings together ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observing System), measuring GHG in the atmosphere, at terrestrial ecosystems and in the ocean, and NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network), measuring fluxes and concentration of GHG at observatories as part of its ecosystem observation mission. Participating institutes for ICOS are key partners in the European Infrastructure: CEA (leading the ICOS Atmospheric Thematic Center) and University of Tuscia (leading the Ecosystem Thematic Center). Other entities involved include AmeriFlux and NOAA/GMD on US side, ensuring interoperability through the frameworks recommended by GEO and GEOSS. They successfully have created synergies in view of the international requirements stated in the IPCC 5th Assessment Report 2013 and the GEO Carbon Strategy 2010 report.
The objective of COOPEUS is to coordinate the harmonization and integration plans for these carbon observations between Europe and the US. Even though both ICOS and NEON have the ability to collaborate on effective issues, we fully recognize that this effort cannot be effectively accomplished without the engagement of many other partners, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Division (US NOAA GMD), the AmeriFlux network (US-DoE), the Group on Earth Observations (GEO, www.earthobservations.org),the Group of Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS),
World Meteorological Organization (WMO, www.wmo.int) the Belmont Forum (www.igfagcr.org) NSF-supported EarthCube (earthcube.ning.com) and DataOne (www.dataone.org) projects, and a wide variety of regional-based flux networks also outside Europe and USA. Of course as COOPEUS continues to advance, this list of partners is not exclusive and is expected to increase. COOPEUS aims to strengthen and complement these partnerships through a variety of governance mechanisms, some informal and others formalized (e.g. Memorandum of Understanding), tailored to each individual organizational governance structure. Several organizations mentioned above have a history of collaborating and sharing of data. In this historical context, we also have recognized what has worked, exiting limitations, and what can be improved in terms of data sharing and interoperability. This COOPEUS work task is building upon these relationships and working history to strengthen these approaches and collaboration.
Data sharing across the Atlantic, data gap identification
All the entities involved in carbon research and monitoring were invited to participate to the elaboration of a common position on data management issues across carbon related networks, to be consolidated into Deliverable 3.1 “Report on Data sharing across the Atlantic: Gap analysis and development of a common understanding”, December 2013. The main topics discussed through a series of meetings, either virtual or face-to-face, were:
1. Information infrastructure interoperability, requiring traceability of measurements, algorithm and protocols, informatics;
2. Perimeter of data definition and associated intellectual property issues, including calling for open access, metadata as description of the data, solving for IPR difference, and securing data integrity.
3. Timing of data sharing is an issue, with agencies allowing embargo while other promote fast availability of environmental data;
4. Joint quality control and assurance plan, including inter-comparison programs and calibration, redundancy, standardization and management strategy
5. Commercial activities, with different approaches of for-profit usage of data
6. Data ownership, citation, acknowledgement and traceability, including the importance of bibliometric indicators linked to data production, and co-authorship as a key aspects of data policies in RIs;
7. Metadata harmonization toward a unified definition of metadata
Harmonizing protocols, measurements, metadata and data formats
ICOS (Europe) and NEON (US) developed in parallel, while the research communities to which they are tied (CarboEurope and AmeriFlux respectively) are collaborating across the Atlantic since two decades. Historically, the exchange of data and the search for standards has been partly limited by the fragmentation of the measurement networks, often based on short-term and focused research projects. This in turn limited the comparability of the data acquired in the two continents and increased the level of uncertainty in cross-continental analysis. This situation was partly mitigated by global initiatives such as WMO’s Global Atmospheric Watch and FLUXNET, where experts met and compared their data, compiling joint databases of harmonized measurements. While NOAA's atmospheric network grew over the last two decades, the research infrastructures ICOS and NEON created more recently a new situation whereby data and standards are standardized, at least at the regional level (US, Europe).
In the context of COOPEUS, a number of exchanges in particular between Europe and USA have been organized. These exchanges involved mainly people from ICOS, NEON and AmeriFlux but they have been also organized in order to extend the collaboration and coordination activities beyond these two infrastructures. In particular, discussions and exchanges have been organized with USCCC/ChinaFlux and the Brazilian network of ecosystem sites. In line with the work plan, the impact of these visits was to ensure that protocols across these networks are comparable and that joint activities are started in order to increase the level of harmonization beyond the USA-Europe system.
In addition to these visits, and within the three years of project time, WP3 Carbon observations has organised approx. 13 strategic face-to-face working group meetings as well as regular telephone conferences of various formats. The aim of these virtual or real meeting was to deepen the mutual understanding of data policies and interoperability in the perimeter of WP3 and to prepare and build joint progress in Carbon research infrastructures. Work was performed in a transatlantic and international context, and was not limited to ICOS and NEON, but also generally involved scientists and engineers of other Carbon observation networks.
A detailed description of all events including the personal exchanges can be found in Deliverable 3.3 “Report from working groups”, July 2015 and Deliverable 3.4 “Report from working groups”, July 2015.
Joint EU US ICOS-NEON-NOAA user workshop on infrastructure and data use
In the frame of COOPEUS, the importance of securing the interoperability of distributed observatories across the Atlantic has received strong support. Even though ICOS and NEON have a certain number of common data products, the data products, algorithmic approaches, work and data flows and overarching mission are structured differently. NEON has adopted a cause and effect paradigm to estimate carbon biogeochemistry from the local to continental scales, and has imbedded these measurements as part of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem functioning. ICOS, on the other hand, is designed to constrain the carbon cycle at the regional scale, with coverage of fluxes over ocean and land. As with all networks, they also have inherently different constraints on their databases and associated informatics. Finally, NEON is essentially funded by a single agency, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), whereas ICOS is a consortium of different, coordinated funding sources and joint governance by a number of agencies from several EU countries, and the European Commission.
Despite these factors of programmatic heterogeneity, there are more similarities and synergies between these two Observatories that present large opportunities in providing new scientific understanding by harmonizing joint approaches, removing barriers, documenting and supporting the joint workability of the data. As such, protocol harmonization, common vocabulary, data access services compatibility are required as both, ICOS and NEON, will be serving a number of users with a variety of expectations and needs. This clearly applies also to AmeriFlux that was also involved in the discussion and harmonization process.
To reach the users, a workshop entitled “ICOS-NEON Carbon training workshop” has been designed, held in 2014 and 2015, as a user-oriented curriculum intended to provide a cohort of early career scientists with the skills to use large-scale carbon data (e.g. NEON and ICOS data).
One goal of this workshop was to highlight emerging applications of carbon-cycle related data, such as that collected by ICOS and NEON, by building a platform and bringing together senior and early-career scientists to document future data and service needs to guide the development of the research infrastructures. Workshop topics provided a detailed view of atmospheric and ecosystem monitoring carbon GHG measurements of carbon Infrastructures across the Atlantic and different networks This training workshop aimed at inspiring early career scientists dedicated to carbon and greenhouse gas research and training early adopters of the joint harmonized datasets. In addition, practical use cases and scientific hands-on approaches were conducted, focused on emerging applications to raise the awareness and curiosity of participants for data fusion techniques across scale, thematic and regional boundaries.
This workshop brought together early-career scientists (including advanced PhD students and postdocs) and future data users interested in emergent issues and methods wishing to broaden and deepen their knowledge and to identify new research opportunities opened by the availability of measurements acquired by these new carbon research infrastructures. This was a group of diverse and deeply committed participants with equal gender distribution, with most participants conducting research in a country different than their birth country. World-renowned speakers came from the US and several European countries. We held an open application process that was disseminated in the scientific communities by e-mail lists and webpage announcement.
Deliverable 3.2 “Report on EU-US users perspectives”, October 2014 gives a detailed overview about the content, with a detailed list of speakers and presentations.
In addition, COOPEUS strategy has been presented also at the User workshop organized in Boulder (USA) in 2014 and 2015 (FLUXCOURSE) where NEON is also participating.
Interoperability and Interworkability analysis
Task 3.4 has analyzed specifically the issues and options in the interoperability and interworkability of the EU and US GHG research infrastructures. To better evaluate the comparability of measurements in ICOS Ecosystem and NEON, co-location of systems in both ICOS and NEON has been proposed. The selection of the first ICOS Ecosystem site where the NEON standard equipment will be installed is started with an open call for applications from the ICOS Head Office which will be concluded by end of 2015 in order to start the NEON tower facility building in early 2016.
Interoperability of atmospheric data is secured by the ICOS Central Analytical Laboratories (CAL) and the Atmospheric Thematic Center (ATC). In complement, the ICOS Carbon Portal (Ingrid van der Laan-Luijkx) together with NOAA ESRL (Ken Masarie) have prepared the GLOBALVIEWplus (GV+) cooperative data product. GV+ is a data package that includes 205 atmospheric carbon dioxide records derived from observations made by 25 laboratories from 16 countries. Data for the period 1968-2014 (where available) are included on an hourly time step for all high-frequency (quasi-continuous) measurements. Out of the 205 data sets, 21 data sets are from 12 potential ICOS stations, measured by 11 European laboratories. GV+ includes (besides the data sets themselves): metadata, a summary of included data sets, an e-mail address list of all data providers, and the complete set of configuration files used to prepare the product. GV+ uses a fair use statement as well as a required citation including DOI to ensure fair credit to the contributing laboratories for their work. GV+ can be obtained directly from the ObsPack Data Portal at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/obspack/.
To analyze the interoperability of data across the Atlantic through the most demanding usage of carbon data, COOPEUS partners ICOS and NEON convened a Data assimilation workshop at the Cité Universitaire, Paris/France, April 20-21, 2015. The initial objective from this work task 3.4 was to ‘compare experiences and identify issues encountered by the users’, more specifically ‘model-data fusion experts’. We brought together a diverse group of representatives of TRANSCOM, MACC, CARBONTRACKER, Global Carbon Project, and other model data fusion experts around the joint use of EU and US infrastructure. Representatives of FLUXNET, GEOLAND, and other data user were participating in the workshop. The aim to gather communities and groups has been successful. Greenhouse gas modeling scientists, from ocean, surface flux and atmospheric expertise, working at the forefront of data model fusion research also working across scales, disciplines, and involved in education, communication and community engagement. We set two primary objectives to the workshop, i) to present and discuss recent progress of the state of the art of data assimilation approaches - since data assimilation is considered as a large, if not the largest, potential use of data originating from various networks and hence a proxy for interoperability requirement of C networks-, and ii) to gather input on the data management, informatics, and workflow needs for this research community. Details about the workshop can be found in Deliverable 3.5 “Report on the Model data fusion workshop”, June 2015.
3.1.3 WP4 - Ocean Observation; EMSO (EU) and OOI (USA)
WP lead: INGV
WP4 had as a main goal to generate the ground for a sustainable, collaborative working environment between the OOI and EMSO large-scale research infrastructures for ocean observation and also aimed at fostering a long-term collaboration between OOI and EMSO with the ultimate goal of preparing the ground for a shared and mutually beneficial scientific partnership able to improve scientists’ capability to reply to the challenging issues of environment and climate change.
In the first phase of COOPEUS, EMSO and OOI have set the framework for la ong-term collaboration plan. The plan recognized that EMSO and OOI share a wide disciplinary spectrum (physical oceanography, biogeochemistry, marine ecology and geohazards), face similar technological challenges (deployment, management and maintenance of equipment) and ICT developments for data management and device control infrastructure. The convergence towards a common vision of the role of the ocean observation research infrastructure for Earth System Science has been easily reached and recognized as a solid base for ongoing collaborations. In particular the complementarity in the geographical coverage is considered as an important added value in order to enable the interlinked use of ocean data and thus increase predictive capacities of global modeling.
Furthermore, a gab analysis of the data policies and procedures identified the grounds upon which a platform for long-term sharing of oceanic data across the Atlantic shall be build. The following aspects were identified as being essential for a successful collaboration:
- General principles for a shared data policy:
• Free an open access for data, data and sensor metadata
• Data citations requirements
• Standardisation of core data, quality assessment, practices/protocols for field work observations
- Interconnection of data and data metadata
• Initial common vocabulary for the selected physical parameters with unambiguous, univocal definitions
• Initial common catalogue of metadata related to selected physical parameters in terms of attributes definition
• Identification of common basic control checks and set-up of corresponding quality levels
- Interconnection of sensor metadata
• common sensor catalogue for a basic suite of sensors (including settings parameters, calibration procedures)
• principles (practical and strategic) for a shared sensor registry
• Adoption of similar sensor metadata descriptions, attributes, attribute content and formats.
In the second phase of COOPEUS, WP4 has facilitated the establishment of a network of institutions involved with the collection of Oceanic data across the North Atlantic through a group of key expert people. Apart from EMSO and OOI; the participation of a Canadian ocean observation team from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) was facilitated and considered a valuable component. A cross-disciplinary dimension was added as Solid Earth expertise from within the COOPEUS community was included in the network in order to also include ocean seismological data. The member of the trans-Atlantic team are:
EMSO (EU): Mairi Best, Laura Beranzoli, Francesco Chierici, Davide Embriaco, Paolo Favali, John Picard, Massimiliano Rossi, Nevio Zitellini
OOI (USA): Robert Weller, Nan Galbraith, Deborah Kelly, Oscar Scofield, Scott Glenn, John Delaney, John Orcutt
ONC (CAN): Martin Heesemann, Martin Scherwath, Benoit Pirenne, Tania Insua
IRIS (USA): Tim Ahern
UNAVCO (USA): Chuck Meertens
This experts’ network developed around subjects both technological in essence (e.g. seafloor seismological data flowing in real-time in monitoring and warning systems, harmonization of metadata catalogues across the RIs for data interoperability) and scientific (real time joint analysis of bottom pressure and seismological data and use of GPS data jointly with pressure data to improve the reliability of an early detection and recognition of tsunami waves) which have been recognized as compelling; these areas lack a robust and comprehensive frame of best practices due to the novelty of these research infrastructures, and development in the comprehension of socially important natural processes.
A major achievement of WP4 was the conduction of a User scenario ‘Tsunami dynamics and Early Warning Systems for Near Source Areas (Mediterranean, Juan de Fuca)’, which worked as a practical illustration of the benefits obtained by connecting research infrastructures across the at Atlantic while facing up to the challenges associated the natural risks of Tsunamis that may threaten socio-economic development, particularly in densely populated areas. Expertise from the cross-disciplinary group of experts made the conduction of the user-scenario possible and facilitated directly involvement of some EMSO Nodes, such as Western Ionian Sea (Mediterranean) and Gulf of Cadiz (North-east Atlantic), and the OOI Cabled Ocean Sensing Network on the Juan De Fuca Plate.
3.1.4 WP5 - Solid Earth Dynamics; EPOS (EU) and Earthscope (USA)
WP-lead: KNMI
WP5 coordinated the long-term integration plans for solid Earth science envisioned by EPOS (European Plate Observing System) in Europe and EarthScope in the US, ensuring interoperability through the frameworks recommended by GEO (SS). These long-term integration plans for solid Earth science infrastructures specifically aim at the interoperability of multidisciplinary data and computational research infrastructures through the development of standards and concepts for data discovery, information access and computational research environments. In COOPEUS WP5 the following achievements were established:
▪ Standardization of data and access service (GSAC): within COOPEUS the data interoperability requirements for GNSS (geodetic) data and products are summarized by the adoption of the GSAC (Geodesy Seamless Archive Centers) standard, developed by UNAVCO, by the European infrastructures (EUREF). This standard offers interfaces (e.g. webservice, API) to serve individuals, researchers and higher level clients to leverage the search for and harvest of data. The standardization will guarantee further interoperability between EarthScope and EPOS-IP, both on the level of the geodetic data community (TCS (Thematic Core Service) in EPOS-IP) and on the level of the Integrated Core Services (ICS) in EPOS-IP.
▪ Metadata standardization: GSAC supports queries for metadata about geodesy sites and instruments, and provides access to instrumental metadata. Harmonizing and standardizing the access to this very important type of metadata by the geodetic community is crucial for both individual researchers and for multidisciplinary infrastructures like EPOS.
▪ Data interoperability requirements: a number of data interoperability requirements were summarized that have been identified during discussions within different EC infrastructure projects and globally (e.g. IRIS, FDSN, UNAVCO, EUREF). The requirements challenge the existing infrastructures to further develop standards and adapt their structures to meet those standards and ensure long-term sustainability. The COOPEUS project provided the unique opportunity to collaborate with UNAVCO and EUREF to share experiences and identify bottlenecks for creating a new cyber-infrastructure for GNSS data and services provision.
Seismology
▪ Standardization of seismic station metadata: global coordination within the FDSN by ORFEUS (EU) and IRIS (US) on defining a new standard for the exchange of seismic station metadata in XML format: StationXML (http://www.fdsn.org/xml/station).
▪ Standardization of FDSN webservices: FDSN standardized webservices (API’s) to discover and access waveform data and related metadata (http://www.fdsn.org/webservices/FDSN-WS-Specifications-1.0.pdf) as well as various earthquake parameters, that have been implemented in various data centers providing a uniform, shared abstraction layer to seismic data and metadata archives. Within the FDSN three webservices have been adopted as standard (http://www.fdsn.org/webservices/):
fdsnws-station – for access to station metadata in FDSN StationXML format
fdsnws-dataselect – for access to time series data in mini-SEED format
fdsnws-event – for access to event parameters in QuakeML format
Currently 13 globally distributed data archive centers deploy two or more of these services.
▪ Standardization of persistent identifiers (DOI): the EU-US coordination within the FDSN standardized a system for referencing seismic networks by the attribution of persistent identifiers to seismic networks (http://dx.doi.org/10.7914/D11596) through the DOI framework. Attribution to permanent and temporary seismic networks is by using FDSN Network Codes (http://www.fdsn.org/networks) and the inclusion of the DOI in StationXML.
▪ Federation of data centers: European establishment of a distributed data centre system called EIDA (European Integrated Data Archive; http://www.orfeus-eu.org/eida) that provides transparent access to high quality seismological data from large, interconnected data archives in Europe. On-going EU-US coordination to federate the large, complex data archive systems in both EU and US and to define business rules to return data from the “authoritative” center and to properly address advanced technical implementations (e.q. data quality metadata) and political issues (e.g. authentication, AAI, IPR) are on-going. Within EPOS a policy and access rules document has been developed, which will have impact on the interoperability requirements. Currently, this policy is not been discussed on a global scale.
▪ Project interactions: with EU H2020 projects EPOS-IP (http://www.epos-eu.org) EUDAT2020 (http://eudat.eu/ ), ENVRI+ (http://envri.eu/ ) to coordinate developments of new techniques and services to the research community for discovering and processing data in a trusted environment, allowing data tracking by persistent identifiers (PID’s) and improved data citing by DOI. In Europe, in particular within EUDAT2020, the use of the Handle System is being tested and investigated in order to attribute PID’s to waveform data. Currently 3 EIDA nodes, participating in EUDAT2020, are using PID’s in data replication, currently estimated at 80 TB. On-going discussion with EarthCube (http://earthcube.org; US) and EPOS on interoperability and data sharing facilities across the geosciences (multi-disciplinary, global data discovery).
▪ Coordination on data management services and data curation: Data replication and curation implementation strategies in US and EU being implemented (US: Service Oriented Architecture, webservices) and EUDAT2020 services (EU) in relation to PID’s within the EIDA infrastructure.
▪ Providing data facilities: existing infrastructure in both EU and US provide their data facilities for complex and large research monitoring projects (e.g. USarray, AlpArray).
Deep scientific drilling
Scientific deep drilling is a unique approach to obtain data for understanding structures and processes in the Earth. Scientists in EPOS and EarthScope are involved in the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (IDCP) to elaborate on a position paper on the long term vision of global deep scientific drilling and the relation to practical applications (e.g. seismic hazard, mitigation).
3.1.5 WP6– Biodiversity; LifeWatch (EU) and NEON (USA)
WP-lead: CSIC
An initial fact finding and analysis phase identifying commonalities and differences between the two involved RIs allowed for the establishment of close link between LifeWatch and NEON.
One of the major achievements of WP6 was the identification of key points where cooperation at global level is most relevant for Biodiversity & Ecosystems Research Infrastructures. These key points were identified at different levels
• The need to address GLOBAL CHALLENGES
• The impact of challenges on corresponding impact on POLICIES
• Cooperation at the level of operation of Research Infrastructures
• The interoperability requirements both at DATA and SERVICES layer
In this way COOPEUS WP6 has contributed on these key points by:
• Understanding the structure of the communities and how they can address a GLOBAL CHALLENGE, under a global perspective, both geographical and disciplinary.
• Identifying the difficulties of unique approaches in the ICT layer
• Designing a GLOBAL PLAN
• Defining a Collaborative Framework (VCoP)
The dissemination of the approach towards addressing Global Challenges was supported by participating in the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco with a COOPEUS/COOP+ booth.
Furthermore, WP6 demonstrated the benefits of cross-disciplinary transatlantic collaboration on biodiversity and carbon cycling by conducting a realistic user scenario focusing on the integration and use of phenology data from different continents.
Many of the COOPEUS ideas are being put into practice in the current implementation of the LifeWatch e-Infrastructure pilot at Estacion Biologica de Doñana, that will be launched in 2016.
The harmonization of EU-US biodiversity information management strategies started with the analysis of the questionnaires distributed in August 2013 and of the different workshops where COOPEUS WP6 has been present, and in particular the three day conference meeting organized by CSIC in Madrid in September 2013, that have provided the basis to analyze the information management strategies in the two main Research Infrastructures concerned, LifeWatch in EU and NEON in US. Also a review of the other different projects and initiatives related to this topic was made, and in particular the work in other international projects like CreativeB.
A GLOBAL PLAN, reported in D6.3 was presented in several COOPEUS meetings, and the corresponding scheme is presented in the following picture:
This work was followed by the identification of common data and knowledge services and the definition of potential case studies to harmonise standards and to improve interoperability
A Case Study that was reconsidered in the AGU meeting in December 2013, was further explored in a dedicated splinter meeting organized by COOPEUS-WP6 at EGU’2014. A refined proposal for a Case Study on Data Model fusion using phenological data to inform productivity model was presented by Hank Loescher from NEON at the COOPEUS Annual Meeting in Helsinki in September 2014. The proposal followed up on the ideas previously discussed around the Global Carbon Cycle, starting from the fact that the uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks stems from structural, parameter, initial conditions and boundary conditions uncertainties, while there is available data providing both detailed site-based process information and spatial measures of pattern and process that can be integrated into an Earth system model. The discussion identified ways to link WP3 and WP6 around this topic.
A follow-up meeting was then organized in San Francisco at the AGU meeting in December 2015, to progress on how to address this Case Study, and in particular to analyze both the scientific case and the organizational issues within COOPEUS. The meeting discussed in depth the different ingredients in the Case Study, including the different models in US and EU, the data sources (from the National Phenology Network NPN in US, and from the pep725 network in EU) and was further elaborated in the last deliverable reported for WP6, D6.4.
The work on the design of a common EU-US Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) Platform on Biodiversity was focused on studying how to setup a VCOP for the Case Study analyzed in T6.3. The challenge of defining both the relevant community and the associated knowledge map were described in D6.4. A significant technical effort was put into understanding the associated tools, in particular the VIVO framework, and contrasting them with other existing options.
3.2 S & T results/foregrounds of Cross-disciplinary work-packages
3.2.1 WP7– Common data Policies and Standards (WP lead: UniHB, Contributions: All WPs)
WP-Lead: UniHB
Status quo assessment of data management workflows, standards and policies.
Workpackage seven’s activities initially focused on the status quo assessment of research infrastructures on both sides of the Atlantic. A Web-based questionnaire was used to analyse the status quo of the COOPEUS research infrastructure community. The survey focused on the analysis of the level of standardisation reached by each infrastructure, the identification of data management workflows within each infrastructure as well as the identification of policies applied to data access and dissemination. Both, an online version as well as a Word version of the survey was sent to European as well as to US research infrastructure representatives. Responses have been amended during a dedicated meeting and face-to-face interviews with representatives of the RIs as well as by using the gap and commonalities analyses of WPs 2-6. Results of the survey have been condensed within a standards communality matrix which allows identifying the fields of technical compatibilities between contributing RIs.
In general, the status quo assessment showed that COOPEUS research infrastructures have undertaken important steps to provide access to their metadata. The overall availability of metadata is very good and the majority of RIs offer metadata in XML or ASCII format which is well suited for integration purposes. Open access is offered for the majority of metadata delivered by COOPEUS research infrastructures. The level of standardisation of metadata formats is promising; Dublin Core and ISO19115 compatible are most common. A future suitable basic, common metadata format might therefore be represented by a common extended Dublin Core format. Metadata access via standardised interfaces is well advanced but needs improvement. While many infrastructures offer public access to their metadata via the internet, GEOSS accepted standard interfaces are offered by a minority of RIs. Most common is the OpenSearch interface. A detailed analysis has been submitted as deliverable D7.1.
Interdisciplinary core standards and interoperability COOPEUS could reach significant progress towards the definition of core standards. During the ‘COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT strategic workshop on future harmonization of data sharing among Research Infrastructures’ and follow-up workshops such as the ‘Dynamic Data’ workshop during the 3rd EUDAT conference, (Sept. 2014), which have jointly been organized with EUDAT and ENVRI, COOPEUS addressed the still open issue of persistent identifiers (PID) for dynamic time series, a common problem among all involved research infrastructures. The findings of these workshops joint have been condensed within a white paper entitled: ‘Data citation and digital identifiers for time series data / environmental research infrastructures’ which was published as Open Access document on figshare as well as within a peer-reviewed journal article entitled ‘DOI for geoscience data - how early practices shape present perceptions’ published in Earth Science Informatics in 2015. Work has been conducted in close cooperation with RDA. COOPEUS member Ari Asmi has volunteered as Co-Chair of the RDA working group on Data Citation. Consequently, our results on dynamic data citation have been incorporated into the corresponding RDA case statement proposal and communicated during RDA meetings in 2014 and 2015.
Cooperation with GEOSS was of key importance for this work package. During telcons and via email, COOPEUS has intensively collaborated with members of the GEOSS Standards and Interoperability Forum (SIF). COOPEUS has decided to use the GEOSS CSR as part of the future interoperability framework and consequently, COOPEUS has made intensive use of the existing GEOSS infrastructure and RI representatives have registered their resources, standards and services at the GEOSS Components and Services Registry (CSR). COOPEUS used GEOSS metadata exchange interfaces to access these records and to offer a web-based ’COOPEUS registry’. During a ‘Hands-on Workshop for registering and accessing COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)’ in 2014, COOPEUS has identified several potential improvements for the GEOSS GCI.
Based on the practical experiences COOPEUS members have made with the GEOSS CSR, recommendations for the advancement of the GEOSS CSR have been fed back to GEOSS:
• With the introduction of the broker concept, the use and visibility of the GCI has raised significantly.
• Through resource registration by COOPEUS partners, the GCI registration process can be further improved.
• The workshop aimed to nurture the user feedback process that is inherent to GEOSS; only if the GCI has passed a certain critical mass in regard to the registered resources will it be possible to keep the feedback process going.
• More effort should go in the direction of accelerating the registration process, curating the collected information, and adapting the GCI to the diverse user needs
• The current and future role of the GCI has to be depicted in more detail and communicated to the broader earth observing community
• The GCI could play a role as a figurehead for GEOSS, but in that case there has to be a clear strategy defined how this can be implemented
Common data and IPR policy In an early phase of the project, a dedicated meeting on data and IPR issues took place during the EGU 2013, which resulted in a set of core principles for data and metadata sharing: the ‘COOPEUS data sharing principles’, a short set of guidelines defining the basic principles for data and metadata sharing agreed upon by all COOPEUS partners, which served as the basis for the development of the joint data policy. Based on existing data policies from COOPEUS research infrastructures, a compilation of informal policies we collected using the OpenDOAR data policy tool as well as under consideration of legal aspects, we have subsequently amended the COOPEUS data sharing principles by adding additional paragraphs reflecting the identified commonalities and compiled a short set of core data and IPR data sharing rules which has iteratively been discussed and refined by the COOPEUS RI community and accordingly recommendations to amend or improve RI data policies have been discussed. The resulting joint core data and IPR policy was submitted as deliverable D 7.2 ‘Joint core data and IPR policy’.
Joint standardization and policy framework Based on the results of Task 7.1 COOPEUS has established a set of ‘interoperability maturity criteria’ defining the level of interoperability of a research infrastructure in terms of access policies, data as well as metadata exchange. These criteria were established based on the COOPEUS status quo assessment, the commonalities matrix and the gap and commonalities analysis of WPs 2-6. The COOPEUS ‘interoperability maturity criteria’ aim to identify and rate three essential interoperability capabilities: to register and share metadata, to gain access to data as well as to implement an Open Access data policy. Based on these criteria, COOPEUS has set up a user-friendly online tool which allows anonymous interoperability maturity self-assessments and is integrated within the COOPEUS website.
COOPEUS already was successful to harmonize RI specific data policies on both sides of the Atlantic and to set up a common core data policy which takes these differing frameworks into account. In order to allow a more formal approach for data exchange among scientists and users involved in Europe’s major environmental research infrastructure projects with their US counterparts we have prepared templates which can be used to specify Moratoria of Understandings (MoU) to define the rules of data sharing. While initially the purpose of the MoU template was to focus on policy and intellectual property rights (IPR) it turned out that a broader approach is required. As a result, the following MoU template therefore takes into account more aspects of technical and scientific cooperation among Research Infrastructures. The template has been submitted in due time as Deliverable 7.4 (MoU Template for IPR).
Within this task we further have summarized the major outcomes of this work package and within the COOPEUS ‘Joint Standardisation Handbook’ (D 7.5) which includes information from relevant COOPEUS project documents related to protocols, data formats, policy and communication procedures that are used by some or all of the participating research projects and infrastructures. The Handbook summarizes some of the major efforts achieved during COOPEUS by WP7 and aims to condense our experiences within a series of simple guidelines.
3.2.2 WP8 Description of the main S & T results/foregrounds – Common Research infrastructure framework
WP-lead: FMI/MI, Contributions: All WPs
In general, all the WP8 activities were targeted to meet two goals: 1) to establish a well-defined common strategy and the action plan for the future transatlantic collaboration and 2) to align COOPEUS work with the activities of existing international initiatives and bodies. The main results of WP8 have been published in the Deliverables: D8.2 Summary report of COOPEUS research infrastructures, D8.4 COOPEUS roadmap and D8.5 COOPEUS in the global context report. Below are presented the main findings of these deliverables.
Commonalities, opportunities and development needs of COOPEUS partner RIs
During the first year of the COOPEUS activities the WP2-WP6 were working on identifying commonalities and opportunities for their transatlantic collaborations and as expected, the counterpart RIs found plenty of commonalities and opportunities for the future collaboration on data interoperability. As a WP8 activity, it was also important to identify and pull out the joint development needs that could help research infrastructures to progress with the interoperability challenge. The WP8 team summarized the development needs in three categories:
a) Technical cooperation, containing direct developments to the infrastructures, in physical level (e.g. joint measurement sites, instrumentation development) or in computational level (e.g. metadata standardization);
b) Information and personnel exchange, containing direct communication between the RIs, common workshops and newsletters, and direct personnel exchange for efficient building of trust and common practices;
c) Outreach Collaboration, containing collaboration on the communication and interaction with outside actors, such as users, stakeholders or general public.
COOPEUS Roadmap From Month18 to Month 36 an extensive COOPEUS roadmap process were facilitated by WP8. During the process, three elements of strategic process were discussed and developed –
1) Evaluation of the current transatlantic research infrastructure landscape 2) Definition of common COOPEUS mission statement 3) Identification of the action plan.
Transatlantic research infrastructure landscape
The environmental RIs are often built from bottom-up needs of the scientific communities, bringing together and developing the naturally forming collaborations needed for Earth/Environmental System sciences. Therefore, the original aim, scope and the construction set-up of the environmental RIs have been initiated by different needs and have resulted in very different realizations of the RIs. This bottom-up, community-driven development pathway has created a heterogeneous landscape, with diversity of disciplines and approaches. This makes the landscape analysis and understanding the field more challenging. The heterogeneity is however also very valuable from the Earth/Environmental System understanding point-of-view, as the naturally developed viewpoints are often optimal to specific problems or processes. Earth Systems are tremendously complex systems, and our ability to comprehensively understand these systems must be derived from different and complementary scientific disciplines and approaches.
The EU landscape of the RIs is very much defined by the ESFRI roadmap and associated processes from the European Commission. These actions make some issues related to the landscape analysis easier: There is a common European context (at least for recent RI developments) and the RIs from different disciplines have common organizational levels. Even on the EU side, the complexity of the RI viewpoints and RI aspects makes it hard to present the overall landscape using any of the potential mapping parameters. A full analysis of the RI land scape can be found in the COOPEUS roadmap report D8.4.
On the US side, the word “research infrastructure” is more general and has different definitions for their respective agencies, sponsors and organisations. In addition, many of the observatory/research infrastructure-type organisations can be single (member) State-owned as in the EU, or supported by a single Federal agency, or some combination thereof as in the US. This sometimes results in a mis-match of funding approaches. In COOPEUS, we focussed the landscape analyses on the scientific capabilities, rather than on the programmatic structures that enable them. In Europe the focus has been on the pan-European level of research infrastructure, sbut on the US side we also decided to concentrate on the Federal level organisations and service providers. In Europe, also the strategic decision on pan-European level RI activities is centralised to the ESFRI and in addition to the EU Member State funding, EC is also providing coordination support for European level RIs. Therefore, also the RI funding policy landscape is coordinated, as in the US the multitude of Federal agencies and funding bodies involved in the RI operations make the identification of US RIs even harder.
COOPEUS mission statement:
COOPEUS facilitate the global accessibility of data from research infrastructures to advance our understanding across Earth systems through an international RI community driven effort, by:
1) Removing technical, scientific, cultural and geopolitical barriers for data use;
2) Promoting the flow, quality and preservation of information;
3) Engaging user communities; and
4) Accompanying societal and scientific needs.
This mission statement was formulated in a collaborative effort initiated at the Annual meeting 2014 in Helsinki, and the mission statement was elaborated on following meetings at AGU and EGU. The purpose is to facilitate the evolution of international research infrastructures to advance our understanding of Earth systems through four strategic goals:
Strategic Goal 1: Removing technical, scientific, cultural and geopolitical barriers for data use, e.g.
• Develop support mechanisms to assure data sovereignty
• Promote free, open, timely access of data and the associated data policies
• Harmonize the protocols, algorithms, standards and best community practices
• Facilitate state-of-the-art data access methodologies (e.g. brokering) and development of novel data discovery tools
Strategic Goal 2: Coordinating the flow, integrity and preservation of information (among e-infrastructures), e.g.
• Develop and promote the use of persistent Identifiers
• Develop and promote the use of metadata and data format standards
• Develop and promote the use of ontologies, semantics, and controlled vocabularies
• Quality = data integrity?, or Quality = QA/QC, traceability, metrology
• Develop, promote sound, and execute defensible Data Management plans and archival guidelines
Strategic Goal 3: Engaging and enabling both bottom-up (user) and top-down (directives) communities, e.g.
• Managing a governance structure to foster a broad, bottom-up, open-engagement of all organizations interested in advancing our mission statement.
• Developing the virtual organizational structure and fostering the culture for re-use, re-purposing and the sustainment of the collective harmonization of data
• Optimizing data resources (avoiding functional and organizational redundancies)
• Comprehensive support for community engagement
Strategic Goal 4: Contribute to address evolving societal and scientific needs by providing information on Earth System, e.g.
• Identifying and being responsive to current and new scientific frontiers and decision-making needs
For each strategic goals, a set of actions were identified. The following summarise the main actions of the COOPEUS roadmap.
Short-term/Imperative
• Finding 1: Common description of data systems
To increase our knowledge of all the partners and related data providers’ data management systems
• Finding 2: Collaborative advancement on Standards and Metrology
To develop a community driven forum in partnership with standards holding bodies
• Finding 3: Supporting the common data licenses following Creative Commons standards
A COOPEUS action for comparing currently used licenses and support of the commonly acceptable Creative Common standard for research infrastructures is suggested for the future collaboration.
• Finding 4: Long-term preservation and certification of Research Infrastructure Data Centers
Mapping the COOPEUS partner RIs’ plans on the long-term preservation and seeking optimised international solutions for Earth system science data for long-term preservation.
Implementation of Geodetic Seamless Archive Centers (GSAC) software system (or API) by EPOS.
Support the full implementation of GSAC to the remaining EPOS institutions, and advance the use and future development through technical workshops such as the 2014 GSAC workshop in Portugal, and community forums.
• Finding 5: Advance the use of standard methodologies for use of Persistent Identifiers
This should be done in conjunction with larger interdisciplinary COOPEUS activity on data citation methodology, and broad engagement of other (domestic) organizations, e.g. ESIP, RDA, Belmont, Forum, ENVRIplus, etc.
• Finding 6: Creating interoperable Quality Assurance and Quality control (QA/QC) Methodologies
To identify the needed QA/QC approaches to manage joint uncertainties in data across the respective science fields, and develop and implement joint QA/QC plans.
While this is limited to solid earth and specifically seismological data types, IRIS and COOPEUS partners will foster coordination of QA efforts within the FDSN (International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks) in order to harmonize the approach to QA metrics across the FDSN members.
• Finding 7: Develop and execute defensible Data Management plans and archival guidelines
TBD
• Finding 8: training of Research Infrastructure users
Enhance the collaboration among the COOPEUS RIs on the user training by sharing best practises on organising training events and teaching methods.
• Finding 9: Training of staff and staff exchange
Research infrastructures can also support the staff mobility and building-up new career pathways via staff exchange programs and targeted cross-RI staff training courses (e.g. physical and online courses, webinars).
• Finding 10: Citizen Science
COOPEUS can provide a platform where the different experiences and knowledge can be shared among RIs.
• Finding 11: Communication strategy
Novel, easy and quick access to the new integrative tools is also vital, which implies that the IT community should be involved in the development of a new set of tools, however, the IT experts should carefully listen and respect the discipline related needs and traditions.
• Finding 12: Building common language and creating culture of open science
All the above-defined actions (imperatives and frontiers) in the Strategic Goals will promote the building of common language and creating culture of open science.
• Finding 13: Ethical perspectives of the data
TBD
• Finding 14: Common long-term COOPEUS platform
COOPEUS partner RIs have defined several steps on how to sustain the COOPEUS platform while seeking new funding opportunities for the collaboration.
COOPEUS partners will explore international / transatlantic funding opportunities to sustain the core activities of the COOPEUS platform to start working on the defined findings.
• Finding 15: Expansion of collaborative work and governance structure beyond Europe-US
COOPEUS RI partners shall continue to engage and seek opportunities with other international organizations towards broadening participation, advancing strategic goals, and building additional capacity.
Dynamically adapt current governance structures to accommodate new organizations (international entities, RI, federal agency programs, NGOs, and other funded projects).
• Finding 16 Use Case: Harmonization of Tsunami Data and Warning Processes
To achieve the harmonised tsunami data and warning system.
• Finding 17 Use Case: Expansion of federated services beyond Europe-US (Solid Earth)
Being able to federate services will increase the amount of data available globally—to other solid earth and seismological organizations with identical and harmonized data formats and through identical access mechanisms easing data discovery, access and usability.
• Finding 18 Use Case: Data – Model Fusion by linking the temporal information embedded in local-to-regional phenology (Biodiversity) to advance Ecosystem Production Model Fidelity (Carbon)
Compare the different sources of phenology observations, as well as the technical issues like different formats, conventions or quality assurance methods, employed in EU and US. Describe the methods used to access data.
Long-term/frontiers
• Finding 1: Common description of data systems
To better understand the needs and develop (accordingly) the different data quality indicators (data processing steps and data level definitions) and on service provision of high-level data products needed by the research infrastructures.
• Finding 2: Collaborative advancement on Standards and Metrology
Jointly develop the international discourse and forum to advance these Findings
• Finding 3: Supporting the common data licenses following Creative Commons standards
Jointly develop the international discourse and forum to advance these Findings.
• Finding 4: Long-term preservation and certification of Research Infrastructure Data Centers
Certify all COOPEUS data centres as WDS certified data centres (and in the case of renew the certification of the IRIS DMC).
• Finding 5: Advance the use of standard methodologies for use of Persistent Identifiers
Jointly develop the international discourse and forum to advance these Findings.
• Finding 6: Creating interoperable Quality Assurance and Quality control (QA/QC) Methodologies
RIS will introduce this concept at the FDSN meetings in 2015 in Prague (IUGG meeting).
Respective COOPEUS RIs (Carbon, Oceans, Solid Earth, Seismology, Biodiversity, Space Weather) to foster this discourse in respective international forums, and search resources to advance this Imperative, e.g. IRIS to introduce this concept at the FDSN meetings in 2015 in Prague (IUGG meeting).
• Finding 7: Develop, promote sound, and execute defensible Data Management plans and archival guidelines
TBD
• Finding 8: Citizen Science
Activities should estimate the signal-to-noise ratio for the observed Citizen Science data.
• Finding 9: Building common language and creating culture of open science
All the above-defined actions (imperatives and frontiers) in the Strategic Goals will promote the building of common language and creating culture of open science.
• Finding 10: Ethical perspectives of the data
TBD
• Finding 11: Use Case: Harmonization of Tsunami Data and Warning Processes
3.2.3 WP1- Management-led Cross disciplinary activities
Throughout the COOPEUS project, the COOPEUS management has initiated activities with the overall goal to improve the collaboration and data-exchange among environmental workshops RIs by through bringing awareness towards specific pressing challenges and initiating a discussion in the community.
Workshops:
COOPEUS held 4 workshops with the overall goal of engaging the broader environmental research infrastructure community in the work of COOPEUS, and thereby more broadly improve the awareness of the challenges the research infrastructure community faces in regards to data discoverability, data availability and data accessibility of environmental data
1) Strategic workshop on future harmonization of data sharing among – a joint workshop from COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT; EGU 2013. The workshop aimed at identifying and prioritizing future challenges and impediments for data-sharing globally among environmental research infrastructures in a short-term as well as a long-term perspective. The following 3 topics were on the agenda; PIDs; Synergies and Future RI landscape. The first topic was so well received and the discussions so intense that it led to a new workshop in Bremen on PIDs (see below) and eventually an initiation of a working group under RDA.
2) Joint COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT workshop on persistent digital identifiers (PID) for open time series data, Bremen, MARUM June 2013 (2 days). A major prerequisite for the proper use of persistent identifiers (PID) e.g. within data citations, is the persistence of both, identifiers as well as the integrity of the associated data set. This poses questions when PIDs are to be used for unfinished data sets or open time series data. The workshop participants discussed and compared solutions currently used in some major European research infrastructures with the overall goal to find a best practice solution for the usage of PIDs for open time series data. As an outcome 9 golden rules were formulated for the use of PIDs for open time series data. Furthermore, the workshop resulted in the formation of a new RDA working group targeting PID issues
3) A 2-day Hands-on Workshop about registering and accessing resources from COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) was held in BREMEN in July 2014. This workshop had a significant impact. COOPEUS views the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) as an important platform promoting cross-disciplinary approaches in the studies of multifaceted environmental challenges, and the research infrastructures in COOPEUS are currently in the process of registering their resources and services within the GCI. The workshop revealed that data policies of the individual RIs can often be the first impediment for their use of the GCI. Through hands-on exercises registering resources from the COOPEUS RIs, the first steps were taken to implement the GCI as a platform for documenting the capabilities of the COOPEUS RIs. Recommendations from the workshop participants revealed that in order to attract research infrastructures to use the GCI, the registration process must be simplified and accelerated. The resource registration and feedback by COOPEUS partners can play an important role in these efforts. As a result of this workshop, a specific COOPEUS registry over available COOPEUS services was initiated at the GEOSS GCI. The lessons from the workshop were presented at AGU2014 and GEOSS workshop in Copenhagen 2015. A full report on the outcome of the workshop was circulated to GEOSS. This report is available on the COOPEUS webpage (http://www.coopeus.eu/workshop-report/).
4) A Joint COOPEUS/ODIP workshop on connecting research infrastructures through brokering services – EGU2014 Vienna on. The workshop aiming a debate on the role of brokering services in the future RI-landscape. The workshop was initiated by an inspiring keynote talk by Stefano Nativi Head of CNR-IIA Unit in Florence, Italian National Research Council. In general, the audience embrace the use of brokers both the improved connectivity between research infrastructure and due to the improved data discoverability that is generated.
Through these workshops COOPEUS as contributed to continued discussion and development of the environmental research infrastructure community.
ILEAPS newsletter
In order to engage an ever larger community, COOPEUS was initiator of a special issue of the iLEAPS-newsletter on the environmental Research infrastructure landscape. Ketil Koop-Jakobsen from COOPEUS was guest editor on the production, which presented many of the Research infrastructures in COOPEUS as well as RI-projects including an article specifically on COOPEUS. Furthermore, the newsletter included interview articles targeting the integration of environmental RIs across borders as well as across scientific disciplines. The Newsletter was printed in 3000 copies, electronic versions as well as hard-copies was mail to regular subscribers of the iLEAPS newsletter and handed out at Conferences, meetings and workshops. The Newsletter is available from the iLEAPS homepage and from the COOPEUS website (http://www.coopeus.eu/ileaps-newsletter-special-issue-on-research-infrastructures/)
Potential Impact:
1 COOPEUS Impact statement:
1.1 COOPEUS in the global context - WP8 Impact statement
In COOPEUS, WP8 had an overarching role generating the vision and mission for COOPEUS as well as analyzing the Research infrastructure landscape in which COOPEUS operates. COOPEUS WP8 here gives a statement on the impact of COOPEUS in a global context.
COOPEUS has been active in interacting with a large group of institutions, initiatives and projects, special attention has been given to the liaison activities with GEO – GEOSS, Research Date Alliance and Belmont Forum’s environmental data management and e-infrastructure activity. COOPEUS is now recognized platform for global collaboration among environmental research infrastructures in the global context.
Many of the liaison and collaboration activities has been shared with other COOPEUS Work Packages, e.g. WP7 has successfully organized a hand-on GEOSS workshop and each of the thematic WPs (WP2-6) have been active in their own science domain. The WP8 interactions with other initiatives have been focused on communication via Strategic Cooperation Board and on ensuring the COOPEUS partners are well-presented in the relevant international data interoperability activities. For example, COOPEUS project coordinator Christoph Waldmann have been the member of the Steering Committee and Sanna Sorvari and Jean-Daniel Paris have been members of the general assembly of the Belmont Forum’s initiative on data management and e-infrastructures. In addition, several members (e.g. Ari Asmi, Robert Hubert) of the COOPEUS project are leading or active members of the RDA working Groups. Sorvari is also a Scientific Committee member of the ICSU – World Data System that is also relevant actor for promoting international data interoperability.
For the future international collaboration, the COOPEUS governance structure is designed to adapt to accommodate other international initiatives and organizations that have expressed strong interest in becoming part of COOPEUS. In particular, wider collaboration with Canada, Australia, Asian, and circumpolar organizations is foreseen. Many of the COOPEUS partners have already international collaboration and are moving towards deeper international work, and COOPEUS enables the coordination and communication platform for this international activities. The Strategic Cooperation board in COOPEUS has drafted a set of COOPEUS Guidelines for Engaging New Partners. This document describes some basic principles to guide engagement with new entities as well as a few simple processes to follow. The goal for the principles is to ensure that new partners are aligned with the COOPEUS mission and approach.
In addition, with the international collaboration COOPEUS is able to ask new questions for scientific and societal importance that;
• Span cross-disciplines that have not been able to be asked previously.
• Make cross-continental comparisons. That is to say, we will be able to compare, contrast, understand, and predict the underlying processes of environment change. For example, we know that the inception and development of drought in China, Australia, US and Europe differ, but we do not understanding the underlying processes and the feedback to food security.
• Include exogenous drivers, teleconnections outside our continental-to-cross continental boundaries that affect the environmental processes therein (i.e. synchrony, the spatial and temporal connectivity of one ecological event that contributes to other ecological processes). A common example is how El Niño oscillations control and telecommunicate climate patterns across large regions of the earth affecting ecological processes. In other words, in an ever increasingly connected global world, the environmental horizons need to look beyond classic boarders to examine causal processes, particularly in light of changing synoptic climate, new migrations, and human mediated changes in mass and energy flows.
Lastly and importantly, the success of COOPEUS in meeting its strategic goals and acting as a node in the global context is only ensured by adequate support and resources – both human and funding.
1.2 Individual WPs impact statements:
The individual COOPEUS work packages made a significant impact within their scientific domains.
1.2.1 WP2 Impact Space Weather EISCAT – AMISR
The main impact from Work Package 2 comes from the Roadmap for collaborations in incoherent scatter radar operations. The roadmap is the result from a collaboration between EISCAT and its US counterparts, but the idea is that its recommendations should be of general value for all operators of incoherent scatter radar facilities world-wide. The contents of this roadmap include many aspects of data formats and access because of the trend for incoherent scatter radar observations to become increasingly more data intensive, and accordingly the suggestions in the roadmap are in line with the capabilities and standards followed by e-infrastructure providers that have the experience needed for transferring and storing large data volumes. The suggested solutions are also both technologically and economically realistic for any incoherent scatter radar operator, and they are scalable so that future, potentially larger and more data intensive, systems also could benefit from consulting this roadmap. The roadmap is also consistent with the requirements and expectations of the users of the radar facilities.
The completion of this roadmap is timed very well since EISCAT Scientific Association is planning to build a large new incoherent scatter radar system, EISCAT_3D, within the next couple of years. That facility will be a defining radar system for the future thanks to its versatile capabilities, and thus it needs to be ensured that it is designed in a consistent way. This will provide the potential of interoperability with other radar systems, through harmonisation, and define future standards for ISR facilities to follow.
The annual EISCAT_3D User Meetings in Uppsala, Sweden, have been invaluable as a way to anchor the conclusions from Work Package 2 of the COOPEUS project with the EISCAT user community. Different aspects of the project were presented at three of the meetings (2013 – 2015) and very fruitful discussions on the topics of harmonisation and interoperability took place. Similarly, a presentation and a following discussion took place at the EISCAT international symposium in Lancaster, UK, in 2013, involving a wider range of audience. The data aspects of the ISR roadmap were presented and discussed at a workshop dedicated to ISR data issues in Kiruna, Sweden, in 2015, where the participants represented a broad expertise in ISR systems, data storage, grid computing and experimental setup. Finally, results from this Work Package were also presented at the AGU fall meeting in 2014 for an international audience.
1.2.2 WP3 IMPACT:
COOPEUS WP3 activities were framed by preexisting collaborations, historically between Europe and the US, but also more globally toward Asian/Pacific countries, Africa, etc. As a result the COOPEUS legacy will be in the establishment of dialogue about sharing views and objectives as a global community. Research Infrastructures and networks, however, will remain different and relying, on one side, on the international programs (WMO, FLUXNET, etc) and pressure of user communities as a force toward harmonization, and on the other side, on the national funding sources which tend to impose differentiation in data policies.
ICOS, AmeriFlux and NEON have profited a lot out of the COOPEUS project during its lifetime and will sustain the achievements also afterwards in a future collaborative approach. The GEO Carbon flagship initiative and the WMO IG3IS initiation are the essential fora for future discussions at the global level on Carbon observations and their link to carbon research.
The short- and long-term view includes
• Strengthening existing networks and their interaction, and creating new networks of scientists, leaders and users that will continue well beyond the lifetime of the project, through the long term research infrastructures coordination offices
• Reinforce and improve the cooperation transatlantic between European and US Research infrastructure in the field of Carbon Greenhouse Gases, through joint activities and participation to global coordination initiatives in particular including users
• Speed up the development of a common vision for the next decades that could help the parallel development of the RIs
• Lay foundations for harmonized data policies and a better documentation of the data lifecycle across the Atlantic and disseminate policy-relevant information on global carbon cycle and GHG
• Emerge global initiatives, e.g.; through the GEO Carbon flagship initiative, led by ICOS, which aims at providing more inclusive coordination among the main actors monitoring carbon cycle and GHG at global level to further develop inter-operability between in-situ infrastructures and networks by data harmonization (data and metadata formats), further development of full and open data sharing, and Long-term sustainability of data centers and model result repository.
• Strengthen the elaboration of standards through international organization such as WMO and with the national metrological institutes (who have already an intl platform: BIPM)
• Implementation of COOPEUS outcome in regard to cross-disciplinary data exchange will be enforced through the promotion of enhanced metadata and data discovery to meet users needs (metadata standardization, technical aspects: web services, xml documentation, etc.), e.g.; through ENVRI+
1.2.3 WP4 impact statement
COPEUS has leveraged international scientific cooperation in some sectors of the Ocean Observation RIs creating a common ground for the RI’s development which will be extended to other non-EU countries and will facilitate the birth of a real global network of RIs able to address Global environmental challenges for the societal benefit. While Marine RIs together with the other Environmental RIs have the mission to address continental-scale and global Challenges, COOPEUS has contributed to increasing the awareness that these challenges call for RIs joining the forces across the world.
A straightforward large impact of the COOPEUS Ocean Observation component is about consciousness that the joint use of the RIs data is essential to face grand environmental challenges and that this implies adopting data management schemes according to shared principles, to improve the usefulness of global platforms like GEOSS, to adopt common policies for the full data cycle, to work on common techniques for data collection and quality assurance, and to constantly exchange and update best practices for design and development of remote components.
A major impact is obviously related to the advancement of knowledge of ocean processes which is the condition to make steps toward solutions to the most compelling challenges. A world-class framework of collaboration where such challenges can be discussed and analyzed, where global research projects and programs can be prepared, and where a new generation of scientists are fostered, with a wider and more realistic vision of the relations among the ocean environmental processes.
1.2.4 WP5 Impact statement
The integration of solid Earth science infrastructures in EU and US will have a profound and positive long-term effect on the infrastructure panorama in Europe and the US, bringing together the main classes of infrastructures covering different aspects of monitoring and geo-hazard and risk assessment under a single program, as well as expanding the access to and collection of multidisciplinary data in the domain of Earth sciences. The interoperability of multidisciplinary data and computational research infrastructures will accelerate scientific research and information gathering based on big data research, through the development of standards and concepts for data discovery, information access and computational research environments.
The EPOS and EarthScope RI infrastructures interoperability provide to the constructing of a coordinated and broadly oriented seismological observational infrastructure, by integrating a wide diversity of seismological networks and data centers with FDSN as coordinating organization. The coordination and implementation of multi-disciplinary data service facilities involving a distributed, but integrated, set of data archives, including innovative and standardized service facilities for the research community.
1.2.5 WP6 Impact statement
Regarding the use of bilateral cooperation to speed up developing a common vision for the next decades, identifying existing gaps and creating the opportunities to better face global environmental challenges, the initial fact finding and analysis phase included the distribution and analysis of questionnaires to the biodiversity research community, followed by a successful meeting organized in Madrid in September 2013 joining experts from EU and US.
Reinforcing cooperation between the EC and the US in the field of environmental research infrastructure was further supported with the visit from EU-LifeWatch researchers to US-NEON facilities in October 2013, in the framework of the COOPEUS Annual Meeting, the participation in two splinter meetings at EGU meetings (2013, 2014) , and in an AGU Fall Meeting (2014).
Scientific data management was reviewed following the ideas from the DataOne initiative, that were further discussed under the light of the RDA discussions (Dublin, Amsterdam 2014, and Paris 2015), and also the development of common policies for the full data life cycle, that are been finally implemented in the LifeWatch pilot e-infrastructure in Spain (the ideas analyzed under COOPEUS have been included in the tender documents currently being implemented by companies like Telefonica, Fujitsu and GMV Engineering).
Also, regarding the strengthening development of a consistent and dynamic European policy for environmental research infrastructure, their data and beyond, the ideas discussed at COOPEUS have been propagated to the EGI LifeWatch Competence Center being implemented under the EGI-Engage H2020 project, started in March 2015. They are also being considered in the WP2 of the new H2020 project INDIGO-DataCloud, where Task 2.2 is explicitly oriented to cover the data management issues, with the participation of two COOPEUS partners, CSIC and INGV.
The impact on advance basic knowledge and on the management of natural hazards and preservation of the environment will come from new projects and proposals: the IRVNE proposal covered these two topics, by addressing the theme of phenology related to allergies, so exploiting the Global Case Study developed in COOPEUS, and also the management of flash-flooding events in the Mediterranean basin. New proposals, also oriented to the use of structural funds in Europe under the RIS-3 directive, will be launched in the coming months.
1.2.6 WP7 Impact statement
A key factor for the successful work of work package seven was the close cooperation with major other European projects such as ENVRI and EUDAT as well as the cooperation with international standardisation authorities and organisations such as GEOSS and RDA. Much of the results of WP7 have been communicated during meetings and workshops in cooperation or on invitation of these initiatives such as the joint ‘COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT strategic workshop on future harmonization of data sharing among Research Infrastructures’ in Vienna, April 2013, the ‘COOPEUS, ENVRI and EUDAT workshop on persistent digital identifiers (PID) for open time series data’ was held in Bremen, in June 2013 or the ‘Hands-on Workshop for registering and accessing COOPEUS Research Infrastructures through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI)’ which took place in Bremen, summer 2014, and during the EUDAT conference 2013 and 2014.
In general, results have been presented annually on both sides of the Atlantic during dedicated sessions and meeting at the major geoscientific events, the AGU as well as EGU. Thus COOPEUS reached a large number of key persons which are able to disseminate COOPEUS results within their community. Further COOPEUS could reach key stakeholders and focus groups via direct interaction with RDA within their working group on digital identifiers as well as by our close cooperation with the GEOSS SIF on the advancement of the GEOSS CSR and the fruitful cooperation with EUDAT and ENVRI on the issue of persistent identifiers. A major success of COOPEUS WP7 was the provision of a large number of RI services and data resources entries for the GEOSS registry resulting in a global visibility and searchability of these resources via the GEOSS portal.
A key result of COOPEUS is the joint core data policy, which successfully harmonised existing data policies of all involved research infrastructures on both sides of the Atlantic. The data policy has been used to amend RI data policies and was influential for the definition of the data policy of the FP7 RI project FixO3. The COOPEUS data policy strongly supports the spirit of Open Access. Thus, COOPEUS has reached strong impact on the accessibility and openness of data delivered by a significant number of globally leading environmental research infrastructures.
Core concepts of COOPEUS standardisation approach was published within an article in iLeaps Newsletter mentioned earlier. The joint work on PIDs for dynamic time series resulted in a white paper as well as a peer reviewed journal publication. Some of our core ideas are now taken up by groups at RDA but also within a dedicated working group of EUDAT as well as the continuation project of ENVRI (ENVRIPLUS) and have inspired DataCite, which aim to implement some of our concepts within the H2020 project THOR.
List of Websites:
www.coopeus.eu