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Austria Center, Vienna (© IAKW-AG / Marius Höfinger)
This year’s European Geophysical Union General Assembly (EGU2013) was held last month at the Austria Center in Vienna. About 11,000 participants come together from all fields in Earth science: seismology, oceanography, geology, meteorology, planetology… you name it, it’s there. So, lots of parallel sessions. I gave a presentation on iCORDI and the RDA at two sessions: ‘ICT-based hydrometeorology science and natural disaster societal impact assessment’ and ‘Marine Data Management’.
EPCC is one of the partners in iCORDI (international Collaboration on Research Data Infrastructures), which is an EU FP7 project that provides an EU-USA coordination platform to improve the interoperability between scientific data infrastructures from both continents. Prototypes are being created to address specific use cases from several scientific communities: astronomy, Earth sciences, toxicology, and more wide-ranging use cases in data publication. The work on prototypes is complemented by analysis of data organisations and solutions in the communities.
iCORDI has played a leading role in setting up the Research Data Alliance (RDA), which is funded by the EU, USA and Australia. The aim of the RDA is to accelerate and facilitate research data sharing and exchange internationally. The work of the RDA will primarily be undertaken through working groups. Participation in (and starting new) working groups is open to all (see the forum).
There were interesting talks at the hydrometeorology session on how international organisations (in this case, GEOSS) can promote collaboration between nations which leads to them opening up their national data, and how access to previously closed datasets (in this case, hydrological data in the UK) can be used to comprehensively evaluate forecast models.
The talks at the marine data session led to a lot of discussion in the audience about the large number of initiatives similar to iCORDI in Europe, the USA, and internationally, and how these should be coordinated so that they aren’t all doing the same thing.
Big data at EPCC
iCORDI is one of EPCC's data research projects.
