PID services are a fundamental building block of the EOSC
The European Open Science Cloud is now entering its implementation phase. Several projects, including EOSC-hub and FREYA, contribute to the development of this large scale infrastructure. EOSC-hub by creating a hub of services and FREYA by focusing on persistent identifiers (PIDs), a key requirement of making data FAIR. The EOSC-hub week 2020, an online event organised from 18 to 20 May and attended by over 500 people, brought together key players in the development of the EOSC.
The first day of the event was the “EOSC consultation day” and covered the latest developments of the data science cloud. One of the sessions was devoted to the EOSC PID policy and implementation, formulated by the EOSC FAIR and EOSC Architecture Working Group and invited experts. Partners of FREYA are involved in the formulation of this PID policy. During the session, the current draft version of the PID policy was presented and discussed. The PID policy covers issues such as requirements for PID services and how they will support a functioning environment of FAIR research in the EOSC. The PID Forum, initiated by FREYA, is explicitly mentioned as a platform to provide feedback on the PID policy. The session on the sustainability and governance of EOSC provided insights on the latest developments in that area, how they have been identifying recommendations for EOSC post-2020 sustainability and their “Strawman”, “Tinman” and “Iron Lady” reports. The presentation focused on the development of EOSC and most notably on the Minimum Viable EOSC (MVE) (with EOSC-Core and EOSC-Exchange).
The second and third day of the EOSC-hub week consisted of 18 break-out sessions on a wide range of topics.
One of the upcoming outputs of the FREYA project will be a PID services registry; a searchable PID services catalog that can be accessed via web interface, and via API. The services will be registered with DOIs and the registry will be capable of being integrated with the EOSC portal catalog/marketplace. During the EOSC Hub week, the sessions “Service Onboarding & Catalogue of services” and “EOSC portal service onboarding - Training for EOSC projects” were very relevant to this work and in particular the updates on the onboarding process, the EOSC-Enhance project, as well as the future plans and vision.
The closing plenary session contained presentations on how EOSC services in practice supports researchers in their work on protecting ecosystems and structural biology. Again both in the break-out sessions and the plenaries PIDs were mentioned as a key feature of FAIR data.
Also the poster and demo session of the EOSC-hub week illustrated the relevance of persistent identifiers for the research data cloud.
Two of the twentyfour posters submitted to the EOSC-hub week had PIDs as its core topic. The poster Compact Identifiers in the cloud submitted by FREYA partner EMBL-EBI elaborates on the compact identifier (a combination of a unique prefix and a local accession number) to identify, cite and annotate Data Objects. Next, the FREYA poster PIDforum.org - a global discussion platform about PIDs introduces the PID Forum and its possibilities to the EOSC-Hub community as a community space to discuss, exchange and engage about PID-related matters.
One of the four demos of the EOSC-hub week covered the FREYA PID Graph. In a highly engaging four minute presentation the background and function of the PID Graph is demonstrated. The PID Graph is a graph formed by scholarly resources (such as publications, datasets and researchers) described by persistent identifiers and the connections between them. The video provides an introduction to the PID Graph and the GraphQL API recently launched by FREYA partner DataCite.
After a very successful EOSC-Hub week, we are looking forward to continuing our work on PIDs in the EOSC during the remainder of the FREYA project, in close collaboration with EOSC-Hub and the other EOSC projects.