PITHIA-NRF The integration project for an advanced plasmasphere, ionosphere and thermosphere research environment

The PITHIA-NRF project "Plasmasphere Ionosphere Thermosphere Integrated Research Environment and Access services: a Network of Research Facilities" aims at building a European distributed network that integrates observations from space and ground, data processing tools and prediction models to facilitate scientific research of the Plasmasphere-Ionosphere-Thermosphere system. PITHIA-NRF is designed to provide organised open access to experimental facilities and data, standardised data products, and training services. Participating organisations that operate these facilities, formed twelve nodes in eleven different countries in Europe. These nodes work for the optimisation of its observing facilities and offer trans-national access to scientists and engineers. In addition, an important part of the project is the e-Science Centre. Its structure and evolution follow a strict ontology which governs the collection of observations and models registered with the e-Science Centre. Several tens of observation and model collections have already been registered. FAIR principles and data quality management have played an important role for the registration process. Researchers agreed to implement a trans-national access project, have the possibility to discover data collections in the e-Science Centre, execute models and access the results and register new data collections for easy re-use. At the end of the project, a comprehensive collection of observations and models will have been gathered by the e-Science Centre for the benefit of efficient scientific research.