An open compute and data federation as an alternative to monolithic infrastructures for big Earth data analytics

An adequate compute and storage infrastructure supporting the full exploitation of Copernicus and Earth Observation datasets is currently not available in Europe.This paper presents the cross-disciplinary open-source technologies being leveraged in the C-SCALE project to develop an open federation of compute and data providers as an alternative to monolithic infrastructures for processing and analysing Copernicus and Earth Observation data.Three critical aspects of the federation and the chosen technologies are elaborated upon:(1)federated data discovery,(2)federated access and(3)software distribution.With these technologies the open federation aims to provide homogenous access to resources,thereby enabling its users to generate meaningful results quickly and easily.This will be achieved by abstracting the complexity of infrastructure resource access provisioning and orchestration,including discovery of data across distributed archives,away from the end-users.Which is needed because end-users wish to focus on analysing ready-to-use data products and models rather than spending their time on the setup and maintenance of complex and heterogeneous IT infrastructures.The open federation will support processing and analysing the vast amounts of Copernicus and Earth Observation data that are critical for the implementation of the Destination Earth resp.Digital Twins vision for a high precision digital model of the Earth to model,monitor and simulate natural phenomena and related human activities.

Incomplete COVID-19 Data: The Curation of Medical Health Data by the Virus Outbreak Data Network-Africa

The incompleteness of patient health data is a threat to the management of COVID-19 in Africa and globally.This has become particularly clear with the recent emergence of new variants of concern.The Virus Outbreak Data Network(VODAN)-Africa has studied the curation of patient health data in selected African countries and identified that health information flows often do not involve the use of health data at the point of care,which renders data production largely meaningless to those producing it.This modus operandi leads to disfranchisement over the control of health data,which is extracted to be processed elsewhere.In response to this problem,VODAN-Africa studied whether or not a design that makes local ownership and repositing of data central to the data curation process,would have a greater chance of being adopted.The design team based their work on the legal requirements of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR);the FAIR Guidelines on curating data as Findable,Accessible(under well-defined conditions),Interoperable and Reusable(FAIR);and national regulations applying in the context where the data is produced.The study concluded that the visiting of data curated as machine actionable and reposited in the locale where the data is produced and renders services has great potential for access to a wider variety of data.A condition of such innovation is that the innovation team is intradisciplinary,involving stakeholders and experts from all of the places where the innovation is designed,and employs a methodology of co-creation and capacity-building.

Terminology for a FAIR Framework for the Virus Outbreak Data Network-Africa

The field of health data management poses unique challenges in relation to data ownership, the privacy of data subjects, and the reusability of data. The FAIR Guidelines have been developed to address these challenges. The Virus Outbreak Data Network(VODAN) architecture builds on these principles, using the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) framework to ensure compliance with local data regulations, while using information knowledge management concepts to further improve data provenance and interoperability. In this article we provide an overview of the terminology used in the field of FAIR data management, with a specific focus on FAIR compliant health information management, as implemented in the VODAN architecture.