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Content archived on 2023-04-13

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Another milestone reached with the 1st PaNOSC annual meeting

The 1st PaNOSC annual meeting gathered managers, IT experts, computational scientists and staff from European Photon and Neutron (PaN) sources and e-infrastructures partners in PaNOSC and ExPaNDS, as well as representatives of the EOSC Executive Board, to discuss the state of the project, its progress and plans for the future. The event allowed attendants to share information on FAIR open data, open data policy, services for data catalogue, analysis and simulation, and EOSC integration.

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The 1st PaNOSC annual meeting (http://bit.ly/37tGYdh) allowed attendants to share information on open data policy, services for data catalogue and data analysis, simulation data systems and EOSC integration, as well as on FAIR open data and data policies at partners' sites. The 4-day meeting successfully met the expectations of the audience, and gave the chance to exchange opinions and experiences to all project participants and collaborators, as well as to brainstorm and exchange facility-specific information and requirements, towards the definition of the best solutions for reproducible FAIR data science. Watch the video summary of the event: http://bit.ly/35pcLdt Collaboration with other EOSC projects and clusters has been identified as one of the major goals for 2020 and beyond, to strengthen synergies and converge towards common solutions for Open Data Science. The example of PaNOSC and its sister project, ExPaNDS, is very emblematic in this sense. The two projects have implemented since their very start an integrated approach for the benefit of the PaN community, by defining the domains of cooperation and closely working together in all technical work packages. Mutual participation in the projects and in EOSC governance bodies has also been proposed as a major action to further consolidate collaboration. A similar approach may be adopted also with other EOSC cluster projects, to join forces towards the construction of the EOSC for the scientific community across all disciplines. A major effort has been made to further define the Open Data Policy Framework, starting from which PaN facilities in both PaNOSC and ExPaNDS will build their open data policies to manage scientific data. During the meeting, a step forward has been made, with the release of an updated draft version of this document. At the core of such a framework, and of the EOSC, is a basic concept: data (and their metadata) need to be FAIR – FINDABLE, ACCESSIBLE, INTEROPERABLE, REPRODUCIBLE. Classifying research (meta) data and integrating them to federated catalogues is the first step to make this possible. The progress made in the development of a federated data catalogue was presented. In this regard, work has been carried out to define an API (Application Programming Interface) for the PaN community, allowing federation and exposure of metadata in a way that will enable search and facilitate access to data by researchers across scientific disciplines. Participants in the meeting also got an overview of the functions and features of the technologies used at each facility in PaNOSC for the (re-)use of data, i.e. through data analysis and simulation with remote desktops and Jupyter Notebooks. In this domain, PaNOSC envisions the provision of a data analysis portal, i.e. a common interface to access analysis services, through a federated AAI (Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure) and federated search tools. In addition, the roadmap towards the realization of the Virtual Neutron and X-Ray Laboratory foresees further development of already available simulation frameworks, which offer multiple tools in the same environment, for simulation of scientific experiments at photon and neutron facilities. Training and engagement with users is another key element for the success of PaNOSC and the EOSC. To this aim, participation in user meetings at PaN facilities in Europe is foreseen, to present the policies, services and training courses developed in PaNOSC and ExPaNDS, introduce FAIR data benefits for research, and collect users' feedback about their understanding of and expectations from the EOSC. The way FAIR data are (planned to be) managed at the different partner institutions (CERIC-ERIC, ELI-DC, ESRF, ESS, EU-XFEL, ILL) has been a recurrent topic throughout the whole meeting, with useful exchanges of experiences and inputs on the possible improvements and ways for the best implementation of FAIR data at PaN facilities. https://panosc.eu

Keywords

EOSC, FAIR data, PaNOSC, European Open Science Cloud, Open Data, Open Science

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