REsearch LIfecycle mAnagemeNt for Earth Science Communities and CopErnicus users in EOSC

Project Information

RELIANCE

Grant agreement ID: 101017501

DOI

10.3030/101017501

Project closed

EC signature date 1 December 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Research Infrastructures

Total cost

€ 1 999 972,50

EU contribution

€ 1 999 972,50

Coordinated by

INSTYTUT CHEMII BIOORGANICZNEJ POLSKIEJ AKADEMII NAUK
Poland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RELIANCE (REsearch LIfecycle mAnagemeNt for Earth Science Communities and CopErnicus users in EOSC)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The EU-funded RELIANCE project has extended the EOSC's capabilities with an enhanced support for various research activities, in alignment with the EOSC Interoperability Framework. It aimed to enhance the discovery of and access to research data, including the mechanisms to recreate and use large Earth Observation (EO) datasets (e.g. from Copernicus), to extract relevant information from scientific text, and to manage the research lifecycle as a first-class entity while promoting FAIR and open science principles. To achieve that, RELIANCE proposed a research lifecycle management service ecosystem based on research objects (ROs) relying upon ROHub platform as the reference service. ROs rely on Data Cubes for efficient and scalable EO data access and discovery via the ADAM platform, and on text mining services that rely on AI-based NLP/U to extract and enrich ROs with machine-readable metadata from scientific text. By adopting a holistic research management approach, RELIANCE enhanced EOSC support for multidisciplinary research and the scientific endeavor across the different stages of research, particularly in Earth Science, improving European science as a whole.

RELIANCE services benefit primarily EU scientists by providing research enabling and interconnected services with an added value to their communities, which are integrated in EOSC. The services act as a bridge between various EOSC services, connecting the data used by researchers, the methods used to process such data and the final results published, as well as the Research Infrastructures used and the researchers involved. The services can also be further customized to impact other private and public actors, also outside the EOSC framework, e.g. in the food and drink industry they can demonstrate the fairness of production processes and chains, or in the public administrations they could support national or regional public administrations in their activities and decisions in several fields, from the definition of sustainable and innovative strategies for tourism to intelligence and defense topics.

RELIANCE objectives and conclusions include:
● Provision of a suite of services for Research Lifecycle Management in accordance with FAIR principles: RELIANCE delivered the RO management platform ROHub, ADAM data cube platform, and 7 text mining services, plus 10+ additional added value services.
● Integration and onboarding of RELIANCE research enabling services in EOSC, leveraging and connecting with other complementary EOSC services: RELIANCE onboarded 5 services in EOSC and integrated and reused 10 external EOSC services,
● Demonstration of the RELIANCE services and value proposition via a set of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary case studies involving Earth Science and non-Earth Science domains: 2 multidisciplinary case studies and 11 vertical use case, plus 7 use cases from the RELIANCE challenge, were successfully implemented.
● To foster the adoption of Copernicus data and EOSC services in those scientific communities: Over 120 Copernicus datasets are available in ADAM Platform as data cubes collections, with thousands of data cube products. RELIANCE also implemented the Copernicus Data Pipeline that makes it easier to retrieve and process EO data, and thus stimulates the demand for EO data research and services with ROHub playing a central role.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

RELIANCE produced several outputs during its lifetime, in many cases exceeding the original plan. The services are deployed and operating in production environments, 5 are onboarded in EOSC, and they leverage/integrate 10 other EOSC services, becoming a flagship project that could showcase the combined use of various EOSC services to support scientists in the adoption of Open Science practices.

RELIANCE services were thoroughly used and tested by the research communities involved in the project through the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary case studies, and the RELIANCE challenge cases studies, carried out, involving Earth Science and non-Earth Science domains.

The dissemination activities focused on promoting the project and services in different events, reaching the target audiences, extending the user communities and involving others via the open call and the collaboration with other EOSC projects. Over 100 dissemination activities were carried out and extensive documentation, tutorials, example notebooks, support channels, and a series of info/promo videos were created.

RELIANCE was strongly active in the EOSC ecosystem, contributing to multiple working groups, task forces, and in the collaboration agreement signed between ESOC Future and the InfraEOSC07 projects. We gave various compelling demoes of our services by real scientists to multiple audiences, which brought a lot of attention, and led various sessions in different EOSC user-centred events, including a Webinar where results of the challenge were presented.

RELIANCE produced 30 deliverables and achieved its nine milestones. The consortium carried out bi-weekly meetings, had 4 plenary meetings, and a dedicated meeting with the External Advisory Board. The partners set out a Business Model enabling the provisioning of the services that allows to integrate them with the EOSC ones, but also to offer different, separate and customizable services directly to the targeted user communities. Several activities supporting the exploitation were carried out, like the EOSC DIH pilots, participation in new calls, cross-fertilization and engagement with other EU projects. On top, RELIANCE was awarded the Horizon Results Service Booster to support maximising the impact of RELIANCE results.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

RELIANCE delivered a set of complementary and interconnected services that extends EOSC’s capabilities to support the management of the research lifecycle, particularly within Earth Science Communities and Copernicus Users. The services have been interconnected, deployed and are operating in production environments, using research objects as the connection point. The services have been onboarded in EOSC and integrate several other EOSC services. The results of these integrations enable access to various EOSC services using the same authentication mechanism and account, the possibility of implementing advanced publishing workflows, as well as providing researchers with scalable resources both in terms of storage and computing power. In line with FAIR and Open Science practices, the services enable the reproducibility of results (a key ambitions of the EU’s open science policy), the creation of machine actionable DMPs, and a wide dissemination of results via the EOSC marketplace.

By the end of project, 120+ Copernicus datasets are available in ADAM as data cubes collections, with thousands of data cube products, and 3100+ RO are in ROHub aggregating 14,7K+ resources with 56K+ annotations, from 240+ users.

RELIANCE services stimulate a different way of thinking among companies and commercial organisations on digital science. Indeed, potential market environments for RELIANCE have been identified. Also, engagement activities with the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs programme and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) were carried out. RELIANCE services reached several communities, and are adopted by several EU funded projects, and post-RELIANCE projects have initiated building upon some of the results and assuring a legacy for the coming years.

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