EOSC Future project comes to a close

The EOSC Future project ran from April 1st 2021 until March 31st 2024. EOSC Future has been a major implementation project, building the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It brought together expertise from major European research infrastructures (computing, IT networks, storage, data, tools) to operationalise the EOSC. ECRIN led the Science Project “COVID-19 metadata findability and interoperability in EOSC (META-COVID)”. 

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a huge variety of research activities, studies and policies across the life sciences and the social sciences and humanities: examples include genomic sequencing, assays of immune response, clinical trials, population health analyses, exploring vaccine hesitancy, investigating the role of social media, public debate and economic analyses of the impact of public policy issues (e.g., lockdown measures, imposed face masking). Potential insights from combining the data and conclusions from these different forms of research are, however, made more difficult by the lack of a common metadata framework with which to describe them. The problem is that different disciplines have vastly different ways of organising research activities. The type of the research (e.g., hypothesis testing versus hypothesis generating), the methodology chosen (e.g., experimental, survey, cohort, case study) and the research methods applied (e.g., type of sampling) are of major importance in understanding the data generated, and thus in supporting any secondary use of that data. 

META-COVID was tasked to address this challenge by engaging partners working in life sciences (ECRIN, BBMRI-ERIC, EATRIS, EU-OPENSCREEN) and partners working in social sciences and humanities (CESSDA-ERIC, CLARIN) in a debate on how to improve metadata interoperability across different scientific disciplines. More information on META-COVID’s objectives and tasks can be found in a dedicated preprint, here. As part of this project, semi-structured expert interviews were conducted and a publication describing the outputs is currently under peer review process in the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies. META-COVID included different multidisciplinary use cases, such as how to better link COVID-19 metadata from clinical trials and biological samples.