A Help Desk to support Data Sharing in Environmental Research Communities

Interdisciplinary research is challenging different fields like climate science and ecology[1], where tools to integrate heterogeneous data are necessary to extract new knowledge. Informatics aids to bring data at different levels of interoperability allowing to make them comparable and usable across different contexts and disciplines. However, data management inside a research group depends on several variables such as the thematic area it belongs to, its community practices, and members’ skills and competences to use informatics tools, hence providing research data that do not present comparable meanings across barriers’ domains[2]. To exploit data as most as possible, different research groups need to be suitably enabled to adopt standards or common accepted practices once a community of work, a project or a network requires them specifically.

This issue is relevant particularly for environmental research, when interdisciplinary studies and monitoring activities are required to improve our knowledge of the structure and functions of ecosystems and their long-term response to natural, societal and economic drivers. For instance, a relevant issue in environmental research is the need for long-term management of data which are often provided by different research groups along time. Because activities are planned with a long-term view, careful consideration must be given to data management, by adopting methods of long-term and interoperable data sharing and access. However, different research groups manage data as well as metadata and because there are many data owners, storage systems and data formats, using these data in a combined way often presents technical and legal challenges. Similar problems could affect geospatial data produced inside an environmental research framework, which need to be distributed according to specific standards to compare those which are referred to the same area or locations. In such contexts, (i) heterogeneity of research data and (ii) heterogeneity of research data providers represent difficult challenges to assure a well-structured data life cycle along time and space, and across the community.

RITMARE Help Desk and User Support System

In a similar framework, we have designed and implemented a Help Desk unit to specifically support and enable heterogeneous research groups in data sharing, by considering their differences in terms of data produced and data management activities. The purpose of the Help Desk unit is to assist research groups to make their own data interoperable with those produced by other groups inside and across an environmental research community, thus fostering the data reuse and the development of interdisciplinary studies. The Help Desk originates in the context of RITMARE, a marine research project that involves eight different domains and provides different types of geospatial data. Particularly, the Help Desk assisted the research groups to share their data through the nodes of the project’s interoperable data infrastructure; it supported the creation of the nodes themselves through specific software developed in the project framework.

The Help Desk created and maintained the RITMARE User Support System (USS)[3], conceived to provide tailored approaches to community researchers in order to meet their own specific data management needs.

In order to achieve this goal, the USS was (I) designed by taking into account the different needs of research groups and by identifying which facilities could address both their technological and formative enablement in data management according to project’s requirements; (II) implemented through three modules of facilities and services released through an online platform, a website and a permanently dedicated taskforce to assist research groups with tailored approaches.

These three activities modules provide different levels of educational and technological support to researchers and they are identified with three main types of actions:

•              the learning (1) and training (2) modules consist of educational web-facilities for research groups which needs to initially organize and store their geospatial data according to the data infrastructure requirements, for both technical and data policy aspects. These modules provide contents that could be easy accessed through (1) a dedicated website for the technological enablement of software adopted in the project and (2) the project’s Wiki platform. The latter provides basic and intermediate educational contents, which are available through a glossary, FAQs, a series of webcasts and software documentation;

•              the supporting (3) module consists of a technological assistance service for more advanced research groups which already share their research data in a project-compliant way, even if they still need to be supported according to some specific issues. It is a taskforce permanently dedicated to collect needs and to accomplish the technological enablement of research groups. The taskforce consists of a unique contact point (mail) to receive, track and provide technical solutions to assist different research groups requests.

With the Help Desk and the USS, we improved research groups’ enablement, since we increased the number of interoperable dataset distributed through the project’s data infrastructure (32% more) and we enabled 20% new data nodes.

Also, the RITMARE Help Desk design and implementation follows a workflow based on a preliminary analysis of the research data providers involved in the projects and on a study and selection of those facilities and services which fit the research groups profiles obtained by previous analysis.

We propose then to assess if the Help Desk developed in RITMARE could be exported in other environmental research contexts where researchers show the same heterogeneity and specific enablement needs. In fact, although lots of work has already been invested to form and operate a Help Desk in e-Science infrastructures, yet there is a need to systematize the user support to provide effective enabling services[4]. We suggest to apply our design and implementing workflow in other projects or research network in order to address a putative standardization of the process.