EOSC in practice stories

This EOSC in practice story is developed  within the Cos4Cloud project and targets three main types of users: (1) the citizen and citizen scientists who collect valuable data, (2) the researchers who use and benefit from the data collected by citizens via smartphones and sensors, and (3) software developers.

The service presented is called MOBIS, developed by DDQ: Pocket Science , a small Dutch company specialised in the development of mobile-based (citizen-) science applications with research partners worldwide. Such solution aims at solving the problem of high fragmentation in the citizen science apps ecosystem offering an integration service

This EOSC in Practice story targets both researchers involved in large science projects (via the ESCAPE project) and citizen scientists or users interested in accessing (a part of) big science experiment data for everyday research purposes (via the CS3MESH4EOSC project).

In its research efforts, ESCAPE is slowly being adopted beyond particle physics and transitioning towards the individual researchers or citizen scientists, the kind of audience targeted by CS3MESH4EOSC. The two projects are trying to extend their boundaries and capabilities in order to eventually meet halfway.
The key point is the common technology. Both projects are offering their own Data Lakes or sync & share services via notebooks and analysis platforms. Exploiting this common element, the aim is to enable everyone to access complex data science in a way that hides all the complexity for the benefit of the user.

This EOSC in practice story targets a very wide user base as it is addressed to any researchers, teachers, students, companies, institutions and, more generally, anyone interested in knowing, studying or analysing biodiversity information. It was developed within the Cos4cloud project.

Citizen Observatories are currently faced with fragmentation problems. The collected data is heterogeneous and comes in varied format.

These problems relate to the difficulty of practically implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) rules, which instead is a crucial feature for the integration of the services in the EOSC marketplace. To solve such challenge and support users when downloading and using the data, a better dialogue between the different citizen observatories is needed.

Cos4Bio is a co-designed, interoperable and open-source service that integrates biodiversity observations from multiple citizen observatories in one place, allowing experts to save time in the species identification process and get access to an enormous number of biodiversity observations.

This EOSC in practice story targets three main types of users: (1) researchers using the uploaded data models for their own research, (2) national and international meteorological agencies, disseminating forecasts to their users, (3) policymakers, providing official data to governments and international organisations to support the decision made by the governments.

The dust observations and forecasts services described in this story are  offered within the context of EOSC-synergy and provided by the WMO Barcelona Dust Regional Centre. The centre was created in 2007 by the formal agreement of two Spanish institutions: the Meteorological State Agency of Spain (AEMET) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The new services EOSC-based are still in their early stages, but the number of users, generic, in research, and public policy fields is already increasing. In particular, the WMO Barcelona Dust Regional Centre, through its services, allows to simulate, thanks to numerical models, the forecast of dust and sand storms in Europe, North Africa and Middle East.

This story derives from a market need identified by the service provider. There are thousands of applications in the natural sciences field who were asking for an automated plant identification system within their own applications. Examples include apps that need plant identification systems because they use this information to study the properties of soil and its quality, or because they need to identify specific agricultural practices or promote biodiversity. There are different types of services that build on plant identification which is therefore horizontal to the needs of many related communities. The developers of such apps need to access plant information easily to include this in their research or commercial workflow.

The challenge of providing this service mainly lies in the very high diversity of plant species to be identified and in managing the large number of queries and connected users without destabilising the system.

The proposed solution is called Pl@ntNET, a citizen observatory and AI-based Platform designed to monitor plants biodiversity and help identify plants via pictures. It is organised in different thematic and geographical floras operational via a search engine.

“Pl@ntNET enables  cross-disciplinary research, as the  types of data that can be collected and shared encompass various natural science fields, such as agriculture, environment and biodiversity. Through the EOSC Portal the cross-disciplinarity, credibility and accessibility of this service across Europe have increased”
Alexis Joly, Researcher and Leader of Pl@ntNet @ INRIA, Partner @Cos4Cloud

The current version of the EOSC rules of participation report edited by the EOSC Executive Board Rules of Participation (RoP) Working Group (WG) states the standards and conduct required of EOSC participants.

The rules themselves are high level in order to be generally applicable and longlived. However, the lack of details and specific compliance criteria can make it difficult for providers to understand all the needed requirements, if they have no legal background or experience, which is not unusual in many companies, especially SMEs. Moreover, openness, transparency, and inclusiveness are among the key principles that have been defined by RoP. Ensuring these principles can be a particularly demanding task when dealing with legal and ethics aspects. Therefore, a self-assessment tool, which can help EOSC service providers understand the main priorities of EOSC RoP and the actions they have to undertake to be compliant with the core principles of the RoP, is needed.

The solution proposed to adress the mentioned challenge is a tool called RoLECT. It was developed by Athena Research & Innovation Center, whose aim is to build knowledge and devise solutions and technologies for the digital society. The company is one of the NI4OS-Europe partners and a member of the EOSC Association

Based on NI4OS-Europe’s research, legal uncertainty about usage rights and high costs in clearance of licensing issues are very often a matter of concern when it comes to newly produced content but mostly the creation of derivative works, i.e. work that is produced based on other sources. Before sharing one’s research it is important to correctly clear copyrights for any material that may have been used.

The Licence Clearance Tool (LCT) automates the licence clearance of derivative works and the selection of the most suitable licence for the users’ resources. The tool provides a guided approach for establishing the proper open-source license required for the creation of a new (or synthetic) dataset, media, software etc. or for the re-use of existing unlicensed content. It proposes two workflows, one resource-driven for users that have a resource and want to clear derivate work licenses; the other is license-driven and it can be used when users have a target license and need to understand license compatibility with other resources.

The Social Sciences and Humanities communities needed a central point to gather and exchange information about their tools, services, and datasets. Although plenty of project websites, service registries, and data repositories existed, they were mostly fragmented. The lack of contextualisation connecting these assets and offering domain-relevant means to discuss and enrich them was evident. Also, there was a need to digitalise this research domain which, in most cases, was not yet digital native.

This siloed environment was the challenge SSHOC set out to bridge in January 2019.

The  solution to solve this problems was found in the SSH Open Marketplace, delivered in 2022. It is a discovery platform supporting researchers in the multi-faceted domain of humanities and social sciences at every step of the research data lifecycle.

The SSH Open Marketplace is available on the EOSC Portal and was developed by SSHOC

While collecting data for the NI4OS-Europe landscape survey, it was possible to observe that a significant number of repositories from the partner countries were not registered with OpenDOAR and other registries and aggregators. The number of those lacking clear repository policies, not providing interoperability or addressing the policies incorrectly, was even greater. To be considered trustworthy, a repository should have a transparent policy, informing users about the roles, responsibilities, rights and procedures aimed at ensuring that deposited data are preserved and disseminated in line with the FAIR principles.
Policies are also required in the process of onboarding platforms and services into NI4OS-Europe, OpenAIRE and EOSC.

To address this challenge NI4OS-Europe developed the Repository Policy Generator (RePol), an opensource
web application that facilitates the process of drafting repository policies. RePol is available on NI4OS- Europe service catalogue, a regional catalogue through which all the project’s services are onboarded to EOSC

Recent extreme droughts combined with accelerating human exploitation are pushing tropical forests to the point where they cannot recover, making them vulnerable to large unprecedented wildfires. This causes an urgent need to monitor the recovery capacity of tropical forests.

While time series-based break detection approaches have demonstrated potential to measure tropical forest recovery capacity, they have not yet been applied over large amounts of satellite data.

To address this challenge, the SURF computing infrastructure, i.e., the SPIDER cluster and the Sentinel-1 data cube prepared by the EODC GmbH was used. Those resources were available within the C-SCALE project as a part of a use case defined and designed together with EOSC experts. The provided resources were extremely useful for the RETURN use case. This aims at exploring time series of satellite radar (Sentinel-1) images from the EU Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) Programme to understand the recovery capacity of the Amazon rainforest. The outcomes of the RETURN research are important to help identify areas with slower forest recovery in the Amazon basin and potentially understand their causes.