Implementing Data Citation on the Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resource Monitoring (EODC)

Adopting the RDA Data Citation Recommendations on an openEO

The Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resource Monitoring (EODC) located in Austria works with high-performance computing services and large amounts of data on a daily basis. Since 2017, it has been part of the consortium implementing the open Earth Observation (openEO) standard, which aims  to standardize communication between EO scientists and data and service providers. It allows scientists to write code one time only and use it on different backend providers, but has the downfall of being not transparent. Adding data citation to the standardized process enables insights into what specific data was used in EO workflows.

RDA outputs adopted

We adopted the 14 Recommendations of RDA Working Group on Data Citation. These gave us step by step instructions on what needed to be done and what we had to consider. Therefore, little background knowledge on data citation was required to adopt them. Furthermore, our implementation was inspired by the successful adoption of the same RDA recommendations at the Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA), whose code is open source and provided a starting point.

When we started to think about implementing data citation at the EODC backend, we figured it would be difficult to achieve and maintain it. The successful implementation of the RDA recommendations on data citation gave us a structured plan to make it. The lessons learned here are that, by using the RDA recommendations, the implementation was easier and faster than estimated in the beginning. It made us wonder why we didn’t think about implementing them earlier.

Bernhard Gößwein (TU Wien) & Thomas Mistelbauer (EODC)

Related publications and presentations

Publication:

Bernhard Gößwein, Tomasz Miksa, Andreas Rauber, Wolfgang Wagner. Data Identification and Process Monitoring for Reproducible Earth Observation Research. IEEE eScience 2019, San Diego, USA. DOI: 10.1109/eScience.2019.00011

Presentation:

• eScience Conference 2019, San Diego – Oral Presentation: https://sched.co/UuUr

• RDA WGDC Webinar: Recordings and slides are available on the RDA website:
  https://www.rd-alliance.org/rda-wgdc-webinar-openeo-eodc-adoption
   

Read the full story here: https://www.rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/EODC.pdf