1st online hangout wrap-up: Big Data in the Climate domain

The National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos” (Climate domain) and Franhaufer IAIS (Project coordinator) organized on January 12, 2016 the first online hangout about Big Data in the H2020 Societal Challenge SC5 “Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials” in the framework of the BigDataEurope (BDE) project.
The aim was to introduce the activities and recent developments on the use of Big Data in Climate action within BDE and present the first pilot use case that will be developed and implemented in the BigDataEurope integrator platform.
The first presentation by Simon Scerri of the Fraunhofer Institute was an overview of the aims, rationale and activities of the BDE project. In the context of SC5 the basic motivation for BDE is to show the societal value of Big Data and lower the barrier for using Big Data technologies in terms of required effort and resources and when there is limited data science experience and skills.
Then, Diamando Vlachogiannis presented the aims and actions undertaken to serve Societal Challenge 5 “Climate action” within BDE. As climate science progresses, the provision and availability of climate data at a highly increasing rate could impose problems to users to a great extent, in handling and using such big datasets efficiently and sufficiently. The management and effective manipulation of climate “Big Data” is of vital importance to those engaged in climate research and climate services. To this end, BDE project aims at providing to users and stakeholders an integrated stack of tools to handle, publish and exploit large-scale data resources.
Following that, Andreas Ikonomopoulos introduced the BDE architectural overview, background and expectations of the platform. It was emphasised that the envisaged implementation integrates mature, existing, open-source components into a comprehensive software stack suitable for serving and consuming interoperable data. The platform will be available as an open source implementation maximizing software re-usability and community involvement, while paving the newcomer path to data products and services.
Finally, Spyros Andronopoulos presented a description of the SC5 first pilot to be implemented on the BDE platform. The organisation responsible for the compilation of the pilot is NCSR “Demokritos”. The pilot has been designed taking into account the user requirements collected and analysed through the project actions (workshop, questionnaires, etc.). The pilot aims to facilitate the process of dynamical downscaling from global climate data to regional / local scales with the support of tools aggregated on the BDE platform. The overall first pilot objectives are focused on improving the productivity of climate researchers (through e.g. easier management, ingestion and transformation of external data, making use of existing infrastructure and procedures) and creating opportunities for pilots across communities within the BDE platform (by e.g. climate change impact assessment studies on sectors such as energy, food and agriculture).
The online hangout was concluded with a short (due to lack of time) discussion about the pilot and related technical issues (e.g. data formats).
The BDE SC5 team thank all of you who have contributed to the online hangout and the workshop this year and invite you to sign up for the newsletter to stay informed and up-to-date!