Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GLOBIS-B (GLOBal Infrastructures for Supporting Biodiversity research)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-12-01 al 2018-05-31
• facilitate the multi-lateral cooperation of global research infrastructures to support frontier research on Predicting the Biosphere with a focus on Essential Biodiversity Variables(EBV).
• specify requirements for extracting, handling and analysing the required biodiversity data for EBV classes from diverse sources.
• develop an integrated research agenda with these requirements allowing research infrastructures to enhance existing capabilities or develop new ones.
• agree on realistic solutions for to address the research agenda, so that the research infrastructures can offer targeted services to calculate the selected EBVs.
• draw up best practices for infrastructure support on the biodiversity grand challenges.
• address the legal implications on licensing, intellectual property rights (IPR), and sharing of resources.
• communicate and disseminate outcomes to policy stakeholders and other interest groups.
Another key issue is how realistic and pragmatic solutions may streamline the legal bottlenecks for the reciprocal use of data and software tools from different origins. Solutions should be workable for both the scientific communities and the cooperating research infrastructures, especially in regard to achieving direct machine-machine interactions. Through a final fifth workshop, the interaction with national, supra-national and global policy bodies contributed to potential refinements of general policies supporting legal interoperability.
Data and technical services for infrastructure delivery: cooperation of technical experts and infrastructure operators to map the above requirements with existing possibilities of the research infrastructures. A design for a computational workflow helped to accommodate the requirements, and to identify which contributions for workflow components could be expected from each infrastructure. An additional final outcome is a manifesto with ten principles, which serves as guidance with specific implementation actions needed for participating research infrastructures to fully support the emerging EBV operational framework based on transnational and cross-infrastructure scientific workflows.
Policy and legal issues: addressing the legal interoperability of data and software. Licenses of providers – if any - are very different, complicating the correct use of data and software. This is a major obstacle when composing a computational workflow with components from different origins and owners, especially when legal licenses are not machine readable and interpretable. A final workshop with representatives of policy bodies promoted the interest of actual users of EBV data and they discussed next steps for EBV production on a global scale.
Dissemination and workshop organisation: outreach mechanisms and the organisation of the project workshops. This contributed to a strong visibility of the project and the role of research infrastructures in supporting the construction of EBVs. Addressed dissemination audiences were also scientific technical communities, the GEO community and the Research Data Alliance (the latter ones on the process of getting from observational data to relevant information products).