The Research Object Paradigm to manage the scientific Life Cycle within the marine domain - The EVER-EST Solution

The Earth Science community is facing the challenge of managing the entire scientific life cycle filling technological and knowledge gaps and overcoming the barriers for open science and application of FAIR principle. Within this framework the EVER-EST project put the scientist at the center adopting for the first time the research object paradigm as a solutions to aggregate all the resources (data, workflows, metadata, annotation, bibliography, results, provenance) that bundles the content of a research work to facilitate the reusability, reproducibly and better understanding.

The EVER-EST project has demonstrated the relevance of Research Object standardisation and interoperability to boost innovation and open science (FAIR principle). Different type of ROs (e.g. data ROs, Workflow ROs, Bibliographic ROs) complemented by Data and Publication DOIs enable the bi-directional link between the data and the research output results and assure the automatic recording and tracking of the quality of the research results and ROs. For the first time the functionality of GeoReferencing ROs was implemented and proved to be invaluable for Data Provider to assess data set valorisation requirements including historical maps ingestion to build long term data series from satellite images back to historical ground measurement.

The Sea Monitoring community, representing the marine domain, developed several case studies providing practical methods, procedures and protocols to support coherent and widely accepted interpretation of Good Environmental Status (GES) in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD).

In this context, we will present the Research Objects implemented so far proving the effectiveness to manage the scientific life cycle, focusing on methodologies and results related to 1) benthic habitat mapping such as Cold Water Corals habitat suitability models, 2) mapping the trend in the evolution of non-indigenous jellyfish species; 3) mapping posidonia regression along the Apulian coast; 4) preserving ancient map of the lagoon of Venice for assessing the changes of human foot print.

Full abstract: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1408170