Towards a FAIR and open data ecosystem in the low carbon energy research community

Project Information

EERAdata

Grant agreement ID: 883823

DOI

10.3030/883823

Project closed

EC signature date 24 January 2020

Start date 1 March 2020

End date 28 February 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 999 912,50

EU contribution

€ 999 912,50

Coordinated by

HOGSKULEN PA VESTLANDET
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EERAdata (Towards a FAIR and open data ecosystem in the low carbon energy research community)

Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

EERAdata - Towards a FAIR and open data ecosystem in the low carbon energy research community. Transparent, re-usable, and integrated energy data enable society to choose, monitor and implement sustainable transition pathways. It is a prerequisite for people to have ownership over the changes, but it also offers massive potential for industrial and social innovation. The majority of energy databases are not fit for this purpose, which stands at the focus of the Coordination and Support Action. The consortium develops, tests, and implements a FAIR and open data ecosystem in the energy field. FAIR stands for F-findable, A-accessible, I-interoperable, and R-re-usable. The EU-funded EERAdata project builds a pool of data stewards to guide the community towards fit-for-purpose data practices. The European Union funds the project under the Horizon 2020 Programme. The project website is here: https://www.eeradata.eu/. The project wiki with detailed documents of events and workshops is here: https://eeradata-platform.eu/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page and the EERAdata community platform is available here: https://eeradata-platform.eu/wordpress/.

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

In the first reporting period, EERAdata successfully held 2 out of 6 planned community workshops. The number of participants from the energy community exceeded expectations. The first two workshops were dedicated to the development and discussion of concepts for FAIR data implementation. We have worked towards a mutual understanding of the FAIR and open data principles in the energy community. We have identified gaps and action items to improve the FAIRification and opening of energy data.

During the second reporting period, the insights achieved during the previous period were published in a peer-reviewed community paper entitled “Towards FAIR data for low carbon energy - current state and call for action”, a gap-analysis report (D2.3) and peer reviewed consortium paper entitled “Current state and call for action to accomplish findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of low carbon energy data.” EERAdata successfully held the remaining 4 out of 6 planned community workshops. With the third workshop, the project moved towards establishing a community-based ecosystem to put FAIRification in the energy domain into practice. The main topic is the exploratihon of FAIR workflows and the discussion of what the community needs about FAIR data services to be embedded in the upcoming EERAdata platform.

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)

Few standards for FAIR and open data in the low carbon energy research community exist as of today. EERAdata proposes standards, which are tested in use cases and discussed with the wider research community. EERAdata established connections to European-level energy and data communities, such as the European Energy Research Alliance, the Research Data Alliance, various EU projects and initiatives around FAIR data (e.g. OpenAIRE, CESSDA, …) or the Open Modelling Forum. Through their networks, we a) promoted the project (i.e. FAIR and open data principles in the energy domain), b) recruited speakers, presenters, and participants to our workshops, and c) participated ourselves in their events to present the work EERAdata does. The EERAdata consortium played an active role in establishing a new transversal Joint Program in EERA, namely the tJP Digitalization for Energy (from 01/2021). EERAdata use case leader Massimo Celino is the co-leader of the Joint Program. EERAdata leader Valeria Jana Schwanitz is the leader of one of its subprograms, namely “Data science and artificial intelligence”. FAIR and open data topics are being discussed in the community using EERAdata and the new EERA structure. The EERAdata platform serves the community by providing access to a large knowledge resource on FAIR energy data, comprising a hands-on workflow for the FAIRification process, practical step-by-step support as well as rich information on FAIRification in general and specific to low-carbon energy research (the EERAdata wiki). Training material and links to a large set of further information sources beyond the project have been collected for all aspects covered by the FAIR data principles. Metadata and possible standards have and are being a recurring theme at EERAdata workshops, and made available documentation from the workshops on our wiki and through scientific manuscripts on the role of metadata for the energy domain, gaps identified, and action items suggested to tackle shortcomings. The platform features a tool for creating rich metadata for a given data object in accordance with existing standards, adds this metadata to the searchable repository on the platform and provides metadata file download in machine-readable form. This increases findability and interoperability of data object. Finally, two policy briefs have been delivered, available here: https://eeradata-platform.eu/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Policy_briefs

Wordcloud of the EERAdata project