EarthCODE co-design workshop

• Post by: Sabrina Lodadio
• March 15, 2024

ESA recently kicked off the development of EarthCODE- a Collaborative Development Environment for Earth System Science. The goal of the project is to enable science activities funded under FutureEO’s EO4Society element to adhere to FAIR Open Science practices, contributing to the achievement of ESA’s vision for EO Open Science and Innovation.

EarthCODE is designed to ensure long-term persistence of results from ESA Science Clusters, including data, code and documentation, fostering reproducibility, reuse and consumption of such outcomes by the wider community. A key element of the development is the EarthCODE Portal, which will act as the central entry point and hub for various scientific communities to discover and use computational resources offered via the Network of Resources, as well as data, code and results published by the participating projects.

As EarthCODE is being developed to serve the needs of a wide range of scientists across the various ESA Science Clusters, its effective design relies on a close dialogue with the community.

To this scope, a first co-Design Workshop took place at the ESRIN Scinece Hub on 5 March 2024, giving the occasion for the technical team to meat real end-users, discuss and brainstorm on aspects related to the EarthCODE architecture, use cases and development roadmap. The Workshop also helped to refine the Scope of Work for an upcoming invitation to tender ITT (April 2024, €750k budget in total) which will select subcontractors for the EarthCODE implementation, to develop and deliver core system components. Among the main capabilities that EarthCODE shall achieve following these implementations there are:

• Access to cloud computing capabilities and comprehensive data sources
• Provision of tooling for data, code and workflow management
• Code snippets, open-source building blocks, example use cases
• Support for code maturation and resources to ensure all research follows best practices for open-source code development, data and metadata management
• Tools for effective scientific communication and visualization, including effective citing and attribution of data, code and documentation published and discoverable on EarthCODE
• Access to a wider community to share research outputs (data, code and documentation etc.) resulting from the activities of the Science Hub and Clusters
• Connections to scientific journal publishers to support research publication and attribution

What’s next?

The EarthCODE development follows an incremental approach, starting with a minimum viable product (MVP) that has been designed with the community. In May 2024 the procurement for the selection of subcontractors was issued, looking for companies and experts to join the team and bring expertise in areas related to: cloud computing for EO, open source management, open science practice, and community management. The selection process is in progress.