In many research communities data is generated in a more and more automated way, ranging from one or a few large machines (e.g. LHC, SKA, EISCAT, EuroHPC) to many highly distributed smaller machines and/or collected from different sensors, for example from measuring earth movement, greenhouse gasses and/or from research vessels, submarines, fixed and drifting platforms, airplanes and satellites, to measure physical, geophysical, geological, biological and chemical parameters, biological species. Before data is made available to the researcher, communities do quality checks of the raw data and generate higher level data products. These higher-level data products are well described and made accessible and discoverable through domain specific repositories to the researcher.
Along with the increasing amount of generated and collected data, communities need more processing power to generate and handle data but also require more cost-efficient storage capacity for medium- and long- term data storage. The fast storage resources at the computing facilities are often too expensive and/or do not provide sufficient preservation capabilities to keep the data stored for medium and/or long term. Also due to regulations and/or granting procedures access to the storage resources is limited to the granting period.
How DICE can help research communities
The DICE consortium brings together a network of partners consisting of the major scientific data centres from across Europe for the purpose to add capacity in the realm of data storage, management and discovery services to the EOSC. Via the Virtual Access (VA) mechanism, DICE makes large volumes of storage capacity available for communities to store research data for mid and long-term duration. Additionally, DICE partners provide tools and different mechanisms to support efficient data transfers from where the data is being
generated, processed and needs to be stored and made available to the researcher.
In the current data era, communities are transitioning from the basic level of data management to more advanced policy-based data management practices. In the endeavour of communities to adapt FAIR practices, the DICE consortium is supporting the communities
with services and expertise on long term data archiving, persistent identifiers, data repositories, and/or discovery to make data in domain specific repositories discoverable for researchers and towards research communities and potential users beyond their targeted community domain.
While communities in general take up the responsibility and ownership for generating and maintaining suitable data products and make these available to their researchers, the actual science is performed by research teams, individual researchers, and citizen scientists. The DICE consortium offers a comprehensive set of integrated services and tools to support the researchers in every step of the
Research Data Lifecycle (e.g. discovery, processing, analysis, archiving, publication) and to enable them to perform Open Science in a FAIR way.
To support Research Infrastructures and researchers during the processing and analysis steps the DICE consortium provides personal and project workspace services and resources which are integrated with data processing and analysis services offered through EOSC. In addition, ro support Open Science in a FAIR way, the services offered by the DICE consortium make research datasets discoverable and accessible using EOSC established federating technologies.