On the creation of Virtual Research Environments for Data Analytics

Speaker: Stephan Frickenhaus, AWI

The talk will give an overview on digitalization initiatives for earth system sciences within the research field Earth and Environment of the Helmholtz association. The products of Digitalization initiatives always meet two different perspectives: that of the user of digital services and that of the provider/ developer. Bringing together both perspectives (expectations, requirements, interests) in a process of co-design is not only crucial for a sustainable use and development of the services, but already in the decisions on initiating a project, users need to engage, typically providing and testing use cases. Probably the most challenging task is the definition of a pathway to sustainability, to be followed in the transition from project phase to operational phase. Digitalization touches many dimensions of the research data life cycle, like data flow from sensors to storage, data processing, quality control, long term storage and access, analytics services, metadata, etc, and expectations may be high that IT-services would serve all research domains and their specific demands at the same time and in some cases with equal priority. Thus it is important to generalize specific developments for wider use and to have dialogues on prioritization.