EnviDat is the environmental data portal developed by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. The strategic initiative EnviDat highlights the importance WSL lays on Research Data Management (RDM) at the institutional level and demonstrates the commitment to accessible research data in order to advance environmental science. EnviDat focuses on registering and publishing environmental data sets and provides unified and efficient access to the WSL's comprehensive reservoir of environmental monitoring and research data. Research data management is organized in a decentralized manner where the responsibility to curate research data remains with the experts and the original data providers. EnviDat supports data producers and data users in registration, documentation, storage, publication, search and retrieval of a wide range of heterogeneous data sets from the environmental domain. Innovative features include (i) a flexible, three-layer metadata schema, (ii) an additive data discovery model that considers spatial data and (iii) a DataCRediT mechanism designed for specifying data authorship. In addition, the overall user-friendly appearance in EnviDat provides an important opportunity for showcasing WSL research activities and results. The EnviDat portal builds on a conceptual system consisting of a core system, a set of guiding principles and a number of key services. Its development closely follows the conceptual framework, being guided by principles towards the ultimate goal of providing useful services for researchers.
The Environmental Data Portal EnviDat aims to fuse data publication repository functionalities with next-generation web-based environmental geospatial information systems (web-EGIS) and Earth Observation (EO) data cube functionalities. User requirements related to mapping and visualization represent a major challenge for current environmental data portals. The new Cloud Optimized Raster Encoding (CORE) format enables an efficient storage and management of gridded data by applying video encoding algorithms. Inspired by the cloud optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format, the design of CORE is based on the same principles that enable efficient workflows on the cloud, addressing web-EGIS visualization challenges for large environmental time series in geosciences. CORE is a web-native streamable format that can compactly contain raster imagery as a data hypercube. It enables simultaneous exchange, preservation, and fast visualization of time series raster data in environmental repositories. The CORE format specifications are open source and can be used by other platforms to manage and visualize large environmental time series.
<p>Environmental research data from the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, an Institute of the ETH Domain, is published through the environmental data portal EnviDat (https://www.envidat.ch). EnviDat actively implements the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles and offers guidance and support to researchers throughout the research data publication process.</p><p>WSL strives to increase the fraction of environmental data easily available for reuse in the public domain. At the same time, WSL facilitates the publication of high-quality environmental research datasets by providing an appropriate infrastructure, a formal publication process and by assigning Document Object Identifiers (DOIs) and appropriate citation information.</p><p>Within EnviDat, we conceptualize and implement data publishing workflows that include automatic validation, interactive quality checks, and iterative improvement of metadata quality. The data publication workflow encompasses a number of steps, starting from the request for a DOI, to an approval process with a double-checking principle, and the submission of the metadata-record to DataCite for the final data publication. This workflow can be viewed as a decentralized peer-review and quality improvement process for safeguarding the quality of published environmental datasets. The workflow is being further developed and refined together with partner institutions within the ETH Domain.</p><p>We have defined and implemented additional features in EnviDat, such as (i) in-depth tracing of data provenance through related datasets; (ii) the ability to augment published research data with additional resources which support open science such as model codes and software; and (iii) a DataCRediT mechanism designed for specifying data authorship (Collection, Validation, Curation, Software, Publication, Supervision).</p><p>We foresee that these developments will help to further improve approaches targeted at modern documentation and exchange of scientific information. This is timely given the increasing expectations that institutions and researchers have towards capabilities of research data portals and repositories in the environmental domain.</p>
<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Support for open science is a highly relevant user requirement for the environmental data portal EnviDat. EnviDat, the institutional data portal and publication data repository of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, actively implements the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles and provides a range of services in the area of research data management. Open science, with its requirements for improved knowledge sharing and reproducibility, is driving the adoption of free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) in academic research. Open source software can play a key role in the proper documentation of data sets, processes and methodologies, because it supports the transparency of methods and the precise documentation of all steps needed to achieve the published results. EnviDat actively supports these activities to enhance its support for open science. With EnviDat, WSL contributes to the ongoing cultural evolution in research towards open science and opportunities for distant collaboration.</p>
EnviDat is the institutional research data portal of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape WSL. The portal is designed to provide solutions for efficient, unified and managed access to the WSL’s comprehensive reservoir of monitoring and research data, in accordance with the WSL data policy. Through EnviDat, WSL is fostering open science, making curated, quality-controlled, publication-ready research data accessible. Data producers can document author contributions for a particular data set through the EnviDat-DataCRediT taxonomy. The publication of research data sets can be complemented with additional digital resources, such as, e.g., supplementary documentation, processing software or detailed descriptions of code (i.e. as Jupyter Notebooks). The EnviDat Team is working towards generic solutions for enhancing open science, in line with WSL’s commitment to accessible research data.
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