The EOOS Digital System is implemented and maintained by the EOOS TSC, which also ensures its evolution. The TSC is an operational structure ensuring the operation of the EOOS Digital Ecosystem itself, the access to resources such as Best Practices* and Standards, and a helpdesk to support users in accessing its services, tools and resources. Users are operators of Marine Research Infrastructures (MRIs), and beyond, all users interested in the EOOS TSC services, such as those in university laboratories, or even in civil society.
The organizational structure of the TSC is that of a federation of resources shared by AMRIT partners organizations, namely personnel able to operate the EOOS TSC services. This federal structure is governed by its members, who collectively ensure its hosting and financing, for its long-term viability.
Ultimately, the EOOS TSC is ‘only’ a question of integrating services that already exist independently at varying degrees of maturity in different organisations and countries, and new services to support the rapid evolution of technologies, within a federal structure at the service of the widest community, to finally achieve a qualitative and quantitative change in the ability of the organizations concerned in Europe to operate at sea, in particular for EOOS.
MRIs Joint digital ecosystem
This key outcome creates an architecture and means of collaborating and co-developing IT tools by bringing together staff from different organizations and with different working methods. This is the reason for the creation of the AMRIT Scrum Team (see Scrum methodology below).
This Scrum Team ensures the development of the EOOS Digital Ecosystem during the project, but will be perpetuated in an operational form in the EOOS TSC. This working methodology, which will have enabled the project's IT developments to be carried out, will also ensure their operation and necessary evolution in the longer term.
The EOOS Digital Ecosystem serves the Observing Community, and therefore user uptake is essential. Users’ sense of ownership, their feedback, and even participation in the IT developments, has to be supported in this ecosystem. The Scrum methodology, by developing continuous increments to the tools that are directly reviewed, is adequate for that and provides the opportunity to involve stakeholders along the way.
Specific training and dissemination actions also take place throughout and after the project, to ensure widespread adoption by users, by ensuring that the tools are effectively and correctly used, but also by accurately assessing their needs, so that the tools are well adapted to the intended purpose. Again, the Scrum Team is adequate to allow this engagement process and a wealthy digital ecosystem.
Metadata management to improve data quality
Multiple platforms collect observations to provide a complete picture of the ocean, but this has long been a huge challenge as the data provided is not described in a homogeneous way today which impacts the quality and uptake of data products. The EOOS TSC, which provides an integrated framework for producing metadata that is consistent and used throughout the data value chain, addresses this challenge and thus helps to improve global data products, increasing overall data FAIRness.
Adopting adequate standards for metadata production make it possible to develop efficient Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to streamline the metadata generated during operations to the EOOS Digital Ecosystem, reducing the operation burden, limiting errors and improving the completeness of metadata. This is paired with validated and used Best Practices and Standard Operating Procedures that increase the quality of the metadata and the data.
As high-quality, controlled and complete metadata populates the EOOS Digital Ecosystem, this enables the creation of ‘blended’ Essential Ocean Variables and more relevant data products. The final product becomes platform agnostic in the sense that the EOV produced can be used independently from the platform used to create the data.
* A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to alternatives because it tends to produce superior results.