In nature, lakes are rich ecosystems hosting a multitude of heterogeneous life forms (plants, fish, microorganisms). Individual life forms cannot survive in separation, interactions between them are essential for their existence and the lakes offer the appropriate environment to catalyse them. Likewise, research is an ecosystem in which the various elements (researchers, research outcomes, organisations, funders, facilities, etc) are highly interconnected and can not be interesting or relevant on their own: interpretation, reuse, reproducibility, assessment, and monitoring of these elements require information on their interconnections but also on the who, why, what, and how regarding the respective research products.
SciLake is a Horizon Europe project that aims to introduce and establish the concept of the scientific lake, a research ecosystem where scientific knowledge is contextualised, connected, interoperable, and accessible overcoming challenges related to the heterogeneity and large interconnectivity of the underlying data.
The project will build upon the concept of data lakes adapting it to better serve the needs of the research community at large. More specifically, SciLake aims to extend the technical work in the field of Science Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) leveraging them as the foundation of a scientific lake service that will facilitate creating, combining, accessing, and querying cross-domain and domain-specific SKGs. In addition, the project will create on top an additional tier of smart services to assist in the discovery of emerging topics and of valuable research outcomes and to improve research reproducibility. The work will be done in close consultation with four research communities (Neuroscience, Cancer research, Transportation research, and Energy research). Finally, the project will leverage EOSC functionalities (e.g., comply with the EOSC Interoperability Framework for monitoring, accounting, and AAI) and will integrate its open-source services into the portfolio of OpenAIRE and EOSC Core services.
The project has secured funding of almost 5 million euros and its activities will take place for 36 months (starting from 1/1/23). The consortium, coordinated by ATHENA RC, consists of 13 partners coming from 9 countries. OpenAIRE brings to SciLake the OpenAIRE Graph technologies, contributes significantly to the requirements collection and the architecture design, and leads the dissemination, communication and user engagement activities.
The kick-off meeting of the SciLake project took place on January 23rd and 24th in Athens, Greece. OpenAIRE representatives, Natalia Manola (CEO) and Paolo Manghi (CTO) represented our organisation at the event and presented their vision along with the respective technical details of their work plan.
