OPEN SCIENCE DATA CATALOGUE

Abstract

Open Science is a catalyst for innovation. Across the Earth Observation value chain, from R&D to prototyping new products and development of commercial applications, openness can play an important role by promoting long-term sustainable, community-contributed science and technology. The FAIR principles provide essential support to implementing Open Science, by offering guidelines for how researchers can adapt their EO and Earth Science practice to enable that their work (taking place increasingly in the cloud) and results are discovered, accessed, used, and reproduced by others. The Open Science Data Catalogue (OSC) (https://opensciencedata.esa.int) is an ESA Open Science activity aiming to enhance the discoverability and use of the various scientific and value-added results (i.e. data, code, documentation) achieved in Earth System Science research activities funded by ESA EO. The OSC provides open access for the scientific community to geoscience products (based on EO data from ESA and non-ESA missions and other geospatial information and models) across the whole spectrum of Earth Science domains. The OSC adheres to FAIR principles and promotes reproducibility of scientific studies. The OSC makes use of various Open-Source geospatial technologies such as pycsw, PySTAC, and OpenLayers and tries to contribute back to these projects in terms of software and standardisation. This paper reviews the EO OSC architecture, technology stack, and illustrates how this tool can be used to discover and publish Earth System Science products from ESA activities. It also looks at future evolutions of the product and how it contributes to ESA’s EO Open Science and Innovation goals.