Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SoilWise (An open access knowledge and data repository to safeguard soils)
Période du rapport: 2023-09-01 au 2025-02-28
Soil health is essential for sustainable agriculture, climate action, and environmental resilience. Yet recent assessments estimate that 60–70% of soils in Europe are currently unhealthy, threatening the foundations of ecosystems and food systems. To address this, the European Commission has introduced bold policy frameworks such as the EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” and the Soil Monitoring Law (SML), aiming to significantly improve soil health by 2030. SoilWise was created to support this mission. The project is developing the SoilWise Repository (SWR), a long-term, open access, modular infrastructure for soil knowledge and data across Europe. The SWR enables the discovery, connection, and reuse of fragmented resources by making them FAIR—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The repository is designed for a broad community: farmers, advisors, researchers, businesses, land managers, public authorities, and policy-makers. It offers a scalable platform to access soil datasets, research outputs, monitoring data, and unstructured knowledge in various formats. In doing so, it builds trust, motivation, and capacity to share and reuse soil information across regions and sectors. Built around three development cycles and guided by stakeholder co-creation, the system uses AI and machine learning to enhance discoverability, automate harvesting, and link data across sources—while respecting ownership, access, and privacy. To ensure practical relevance, five user cases help tailor the repository to actual workflows, such as integrating soil indicators, connecting institutional knowledge, supporting public catalogues, informing policy, and enabling new services. Ultimately, SoilWise applies infrastructure thinking—not project thinking—to build a future-proof repository aligned with the European Soil Observatory (EUSO). Designed to endure beyond the project lifecycle, SoilWise aims to become a trusted foundation for collaboration—enabling Europe to act wisely, starting from the ground up.
In its first 18 months, SoilWise laid the foundation for a collaborative infrastructure to unlock Europe’s fragmented soil knowledge. The project delivered two working prototypes of the SWR, allowing users to access a growing number of records—from datasets and publications to policy reports and unstructured content. The repository runs on a scalable infrastructure and already harvests metadata from trusted sources, including CORDIS, OpenAIRE, Zenodo, ESDAC, BonaRes, PREPSOIL, the FAO Soils Portal, the EEA Datahub, and ISRIC. Dedicated tools assess and enrich metadata quality, improving traceability, completeness, and standard compliance. The SWR features a Soil Health Knowledge Graph to connect soil-related concepts and a chatbot prototype to help users navigate content through natural language. These innovations are supported by automated workflows that ensure metadata remains current, linked, and reusable. Co-design is central to the project. Over 60 user stories have shaped development, and stakeholders are now testing and validating prototypes, helping refine functions ahead of demonstration. This ensures that the repository responds to real needs. SoilWise also co-leads the Mission Soil Cluster on Data and Knowledge Management, collaborating with the JRC and Horizon Europe projects to align terminology, standards, and governance. This supports a shared vision for digital soil knowledge in line with the EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe.” The next phase will focus on demonstrating what has been built, gathering feedback, and scaling up functionalities and user experience in development cycle 2.
Although early in development, SoilWise is introducing promising innovations. Its modular repository is designed to bring together structured and unstructured soil knowledge, applying FAIR principles and semantic tools to link diverse sources. The Soil Health Knowledge Graph and chatbot prototype are advancing user interaction beyond conventional search tools. These features, combined with automated harvesting and metadata enhancement workflows, offer a foundation for more intelligent, connected, and user-friendly access to soil knowledge. Through the Mission Soil Cluster, SoilWise contributes to shared approaches across projects, ensuring alignment in metadata, governance, and reuse strategies. Key needs for future uptake include real-world demonstrations, sustained stakeholder engagement, regulatory alignment, and investment in user experience, governance, and interoperability for long-term sustainability.