Last week, a two-day long workshop was held at the Carbon Portal, bringing together people from the ICOS research infrastructure with data management experts from ENVRIplus. The aim was to exchange ideas and knowledge about among other things data and metadata interoperability and provenance tracking and storage.
Maggie Hellström, data management specialist at ICOS Carbon Portal in Sweden, coordinated the event. “The workshop gave us a chance to give our ENVRIplus colleagues a more comprehensive description about what we do within ICOS in a way that we have not had the possibility to do before,” she says.
ENVRIplus is a Horizon 2020 project aiming to bring together environmental and earth system research infrastructures, projects and networks together with technical specialists to create a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster of environmental research infrastructures across Europe. The workshop held at the Carbon Portal was the fifth in a series of workshops organized within the second theme of ENVRIplus, the Data for Science theme, where the aim is to identify solutions to mutual data management problems or issues. Seventeen people participated, most of them from organizations outside ICOS.
“ICOS as a research infrastructure has a lot of ideas of what we would like to do, but it is important for us to get external feedback on our ideas. This is an excellent way of getting that. In exchange, the ENVRIplus information technology experts get practical cases to test their ideas on. So it is a win-win situation for everyone to meet and discuss on a more detailed level than we can normally do in other meetings,” says Maggie Hellström.