Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Fair4Fusion (Fair for Fusion - open access for fusion data in Europe)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-09-01 do 2022-05-31
Fusion energy, the source of energy for the sun, offers a very attractive, virtually inexhaustible, energy source for the future as it neither leaves long-lived radioactive waste, nor generates any greenhouse gases. It provides a potential long-term base load electricity production option and can, when realized, provide an efficient means of decarbonising energy production. It has proved quite difficult to achieve, with a number of technical challenges to overcome: creating a suitable environment in the laboratory to harness a sufficiently dense hydrogen plasma at about 100 million degrees for sufficiently long time for the hydrogen isotopes to fuse.
The potential impact on future energy production drives the current research with large scale experiments under construction, in particular the global collaboration towards ITER which is intended to fully demonstrate the scientific feasibility of large scale fusion based energy production. In addition there are medium scale devices at the national level and some smaller privately funded start-up enterprises which are seeking alternative paths to fusion energy.
Fusion energy research once led science in pushing for open and FAIR access to research, with a bottom-up, science driven community leading to the declassification of materials in the 1958 "Atoms for Peace" conference. This led to a significant cross fertilisation of ideas between the different research laboratories and represented a golden age in the advancement of fusion technologies. Since then, while scientific exchanges have become ever more open, the exchange of and access to data has become more fragmented due to different funding mechanisms, technical solutions and data management practices. Research exchanges and detailed comparisons of data between devices has so far been quite difficult and labour intensive.
The Fair for Fusion project has the aim of improving this situation by suggesting a framework for data sharing building on FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The project aims to improve the collaboration between researchers, to facilitate data access over the full range of European fusion experiments and to promote the technologies, policies and practices towards ITER. Building on the knowledge gained in developing existing tools and platforms both in the fusion community and other established research areas, we will provide a “blueprint” for a future implementation of FAIR data management within the fusion programme.
A well-defined blueprint architecture, supported by demonstrators and prototype implementations, should help raise the profile and awareness of FAIR and open data within the fusion programme and help lay the foundations for implementing an open data policy adapted to the needs of the present and future fusion energy research programme, particularly in the run up to the operation of ITER.
The potential impact on future energy production drives the current research with large scale experiments under construction, in particular the global collaboration towards ITER which is intended to fully demonstrate the scientific feasibility of large scale fusion based energy production. In addition there are medium scale devices at the national level and some smaller privately funded start-up enterprises which are seeking alternative paths to fusion energy.
Fusion energy research once led science in pushing for open and FAIR access to research, with a bottom-up, science driven community leading to the declassification of materials in the 1958 "Atoms for Peace" conference. This led to a significant cross fertilisation of ideas between the different research laboratories and represented a golden age in the advancement of fusion technologies. Since then, while scientific exchanges have become ever more open, the exchange of and access to data has become more fragmented due to different funding mechanisms, technical solutions and data management practices. Research exchanges and detailed comparisons of data between devices has so far been quite difficult and labour intensive.
The Fair for Fusion project has the aim of improving this situation by suggesting a framework for data sharing building on FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The project aims to improve the collaboration between researchers, to facilitate data access over the full range of European fusion experiments and to promote the technologies, policies and practices towards ITER. Building on the knowledge gained in developing existing tools and platforms both in the fusion community and other established research areas, we will provide a “blueprint” for a future implementation of FAIR data management within the fusion programme.
A well-defined blueprint architecture, supported by demonstrators and prototype implementations, should help raise the profile and awareness of FAIR and open data within the fusion programme and help lay the foundations for implementing an open data policy adapted to the needs of the present and future fusion energy research programme, particularly in the run up to the operation of ITER.
The work provided within the Fair for Fusion project has been centered around a few lines of work with the aim of the project to
a) Provide a comprehensive assessments of FAIR data requirements and open data issues in fusion programme.
b) Provide Recommendations on the best technical approaches for providing easy access to data.
c) Develop support platforms and tools required to implement an open data policy adapted to the needs of the fusion research programme.
So far this has resulted in:
- An evaluation of the FAIRness of present experiment data management policies, as well as recommendations for making data management more FAIR and open in the future.
- The formulation of a set of use cases from the general public, non-fusion scientists, fusion scientists and data providers/managers and their conversion into a list of technical requirements specification that led to definition of the functionalities of the Open Data Demonstrators.
- A technology survey of existing technologies and their designs to assess their suitability. It evaluated the selected solution against the requirements and the FAIR principles.
- A defined and agreed metadata model, building on the data ontology or dictionaries developed by ITER (IMAS)
- First versions of the Open Data Demonstrators have been designed and developed. These focus on different technologies and functionalities to better and more efficiently inform future choices. The solutions are based on existing, mainly open-source, technologies.
a) Provide a comprehensive assessments of FAIR data requirements and open data issues in fusion programme.
b) Provide Recommendations on the best technical approaches for providing easy access to data.
c) Develop support platforms and tools required to implement an open data policy adapted to the needs of the fusion research programme.
So far this has resulted in:
- An evaluation of the FAIRness of present experiment data management policies, as well as recommendations for making data management more FAIR and open in the future.
- The formulation of a set of use cases from the general public, non-fusion scientists, fusion scientists and data providers/managers and their conversion into a list of technical requirements specification that led to definition of the functionalities of the Open Data Demonstrators.
- A technology survey of existing technologies and their designs to assess their suitability. It evaluated the selected solution against the requirements and the FAIR principles.
- A defined and agreed metadata model, building on the data ontology or dictionaries developed by ITER (IMAS)
- First versions of the Open Data Demonstrators have been designed and developed. These focus on different technologies and functionalities to better and more efficiently inform future choices. The solutions are based on existing, mainly open-source, technologies.
The outcome of the work performed in the project is expected to have impact to three communities:
1. The European fusion community, by providing unified access to data across all of the European experimental fusion facilities, subject to the policies imposed by the data providers. This will allow easier comparison of results between the different facilities, easier creation of unified databases and the initial framework onto which big-data analytics approaches could be attached.
2. The international fusion community, by providing unified access to a subset of the data from the European experimental fusion facilities, subject to the policies imposed by the data providers and international agreements. This group is perhaps the area where significant longer-term impacts can be foreseen:
- Providing standardised access to future experimental facilities where the EU is investing significant resources
- Providing reciprocal access to data from existing experimental facilities
- Providing a template for providing data for all future experimental data
3. The wider public, by providing access to the overview data from all of the European experimental fusion facilities, subject to the policies imposed by the data providers.
By providing data in a standardised way, the ease of doing cross-device research should be facilitated (“faster science”), and the hope is also that future enhancements in data interpretation tools will more quickly be usable across the entire EU fusion community (“better science”).
1. The European fusion community, by providing unified access to data across all of the European experimental fusion facilities, subject to the policies imposed by the data providers. This will allow easier comparison of results between the different facilities, easier creation of unified databases and the initial framework onto which big-data analytics approaches could be attached.
2. The international fusion community, by providing unified access to a subset of the data from the European experimental fusion facilities, subject to the policies imposed by the data providers and international agreements. This group is perhaps the area where significant longer-term impacts can be foreseen:
- Providing standardised access to future experimental facilities where the EU is investing significant resources
- Providing reciprocal access to data from existing experimental facilities
- Providing a template for providing data for all future experimental data
3. The wider public, by providing access to the overview data from all of the European experimental fusion facilities, subject to the policies imposed by the data providers.
By providing data in a standardised way, the ease of doing cross-device research should be facilitated (“faster science”), and the hope is also that future enhancements in data interpretation tools will more quickly be usable across the entire EU fusion community (“better science”).