The FDO Forum is happy that Daniele Bailo and Jan Michalák from the EPOS ERIC Research Infrastructure will share their experiences in building a European wide infrastructure that amongst others is working on creating an integrated dataspace for researchers in the field of solid earth science and discuss with us about future perspectives of data infrastructure development.

Motivation

The FDO Forum (FDOF) has as the major topic to develop the FDO specifications and foster their implementation to help enabling the creation of a unified and joint dataspace which should facilitate data sharing and reuse to the benefits of the researchers. Taking a naïve viewpoint, one would assume that for people responsible for the building of “research or data infrastructures (RDI)” FDOs would immediately be welcomed as the standard that would solve all integration problems. Of course, this is not the case. Not surprisingly, the many technological challenges that need to be overcome to stepwise improve data accessibility and reuse bind much person power and require long-term agendas, so that the responsible persons are very careful in jumping on new “technology waves”. Architecture designs which account for the FDO and that are enough general and abstract to allow the RDI implementation in different scenarios, are required. This endeavour has been pursued in research infrastructures such as EPOS, which are highly distributed, with many partners all over Europe and beyond, all of them having their individual technology stack, policies and processes, requiring a lot of synchronisation effort to make new steps. In addition, the available funds for RDI and thus the availability of technological experts are limited.

EPOS is an excellent example to understand the challenges in improving data sharing and reuse in detail. Therefore, this workshop is a very good opportunity to understand the practical challenges and the architectural approach in research infrastructure building and the achieved results in detail on the one hand, and discuss possible future developments on the other hand.