Designing and implementing a research data infrastructure to assist scientists from the aquatic realm to restore healthy oceans, rivers, and lakes
I was pretty sure that the statement “Finland is a heavy metal country” was just a cliché. But it’s not. You can walk through a university building and someone plays “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica on an acoustic guitar. But you can also enter the local shopping center on the same day and see a group of people performing Lordi’s “Hard Rock Hallelujah”. Fiction? That’s exactly what happened to me on my trip to Oulu for the AquaINFRA Use Case Meeting. Anyway, back to business.
In short, what is AquaINFRA about? As I already described in a previous blog post, the main goal is to design and implement a research data infrastructure to assist scientists from the aquatic realm in restoring healthy oceans, rivers, and lakes. The infrastructure is made up of three key components:
- Data Discovery and Access Service (DDAS) is a federated metadata search service
- AquaINFRA Interaction Platform (AIP) is the central gateway and search user interface
- Virtual Research Environment (VRE) provides tools to analyze data