Creating a virtual research environment
Scientific research in the Earth Sciences is conducted on many different scales from the local to the global. Much of this research is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and being conducted by researchers who are not necessarily co-located.
To support this increasingly distributed approach to Earth Science research there is a demand for virtualized collaborative working environments where researchers can share resources e.g. data, workflows, etc., ideas, knowledge, and results.
Key objectives of the EVER-EST project are:
- Creation of a virtual research environment (VRE) that provides a platform and suite of generic services to support collaborative research in the Earth Sciences
- Validation of the EVER-EST VRE by the four pre-selected Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) that bring unique use cases in terms of their data, workflows, working practices, and desired outcomes
- Validation of the novel use of the Research Objects concept for application in the Earth Science domain. The concept of Research Objects has previously been validated by other disciplines such as astrophysics
- Engaging with the wider Earth Sciences community to promote adoption of the EVER-EST VRE as a solution for dynamic and potentially cross-disciplinary collaborative research.
Validate the Virtual Research environment with four main virtual research communities
The VRE will be validated and evaluated through these four
real-world use cases which are provided by existing communities
of practice from the Earth Science domain.
The EVEREST consortium includes a key representative for each of the four Virtual Research Communities who is responsible for the tailoring and validation phase of the EVER-EST VRE for the specific use case and must also ensure the involvement and engagement of additional members of the community outside the EVER-EST project.
- Sea Monitoring VRC – led by CNR-ISMAR
- Natural Hazards VRC (floods, geological, weather, wildfires) –led by NERC
- Land Monitoring VRC – led by SatCen
- Supersites VRC (volcanoes and seismic) – led by INGV
Implement and validate the use of “Research Objects” in earth science
The EVER-EST project will define, implement and validate the use of “Research Objects” concepts and technologies in the Earth Science domain as a mean to establish more effective collaboration.
Modern scientists are calling for mechamisms that go beyond the publication of datasets. They increasingly need to systematically capture the life cycle of scientific investigations and provide a single entry point to access the information about the hypothesis investigated, the datasets used, the computations and experiments carried out, their outcomes, the people involved in the research, etc. Research Objects (RO) provide a structured container to encapsulate research data and the associated methodologies along with essential metadata descriptions.
