FAIR-EASE Interdisciplinary Data Discovery and Access Service
One of the building blocks of the FAIR-EASE system is the development and deployment of a FAIR-EASE Data Discovery and Access interdisciplinary service which will provide users with an easy and FAIR service for discovery and access to multidisciplinary and aggregated data sets (in situ datasets, satellite datasets, omics experiments and model outputs) as managed and provided by a range of existing environmental data infrastructures.
The federation of data resources should facilitate the sharing of multi-disciplinary datasets with users and as input to a portfolio of analytical and visualisation services and applications, that will be developed and provided to users as part of the FAIR-EASE Earth Analytic lab.
The development of the FAIR-EASE data discovery and access service will build upon earlier experiences as gained by the project partners as part of developing the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) portal, ENVRI-FAIR data hub, and earlier Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP)interoperability prototyping for discovery of major marine data repositories from Europe, United States of America (USA), and Australia.
In practice, FAIR-EASE be based on the latest evolution, namely the Blue-Cloud federated data discovery and access service, which works with brokerage services both at metadata and data level. The Blue-Cloud service has been developed and is operated by MARIS together with CNR-IIA and CINECA, who are all partners in FAIR-EASE. Currently, it gives discovery and access to a range of well-established marine data repositories, managed by RIs and leading European Union (EU) initiatives: EMODnet, EurOBIS, SeaDataNet, ICOS, SOCAT, ELIXIR-ENA, EcoTaxa, and Euro-Argo.
A further major challenge for effective federated data discovery and subsequent data integration by FAIR-EASE is to overcome semantic differences between and within communities of users and data providers when spanning multiple scientific and linguistic domains. To address this FAIR-EASE plans to develop and populate a semantic brokerage service component, which will be integrated into the FAIR-EASE Data Discovery & Access interdisciplinary service.
FAIR-EASE Earth Analytical Lab and Data Lake
The second building block of the FAIR-EASE system is the development and deployment of the Earth Analytic Lab, which will provide users with an easy way to visualize, analyse and process environmental data on-demand, that is, according to their specific objectives, thematic, geographical areas and temporal slots of interest.
This Earth Analytic Lab will strongly rely on the Data Lake, which will improve data access both in terms of data harmonisation and in terms of technical efficiency of data access.
The project's Use Cases will set requirements and provide a proof-of-concept of the integration of the integrated FAIR-EASE system.
