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Data in action

Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities

Partners:  SSHOC (ESS ERIC, CESSDA ERIC, ENVRI FAIR)

Project description

Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities are an integral part of the Horizon Europe framework programme. The purpose of this project was to facilitate the task of combining data from different domains to facilitate multi-disciplinary research.

This project set out to contribute to this Horizon science mission by combining resources from 2 Science Clusters. As part of the SSHOC consortium, ESS collected data related to political and social trust, health and health inequality, attitudes towards climate change and energy, understandings and evaluations of democracy and digital communication at work and with family, amongst many other topics related to the smart agenda.

The project examined environmental factors, like air quality and climate indicators, and their impact on urban inhabitants’ attitudes in various European cities, necessitating expertise across domains, access to diverse data sources, and agreement on semantics and technical implementation. The collaborative process stressed establishing methods for data integration, from researchers to implementation and documentation, which included developing a prototype system to support the use of integrated data.

Societal challenge

Research about the relationship between urban citizens’ attitudes and behaviours and factors of the environment in which we live is important. This project set out to explore methods and requirements for similar interdisciplinary research, based on a practical use case.

Technical challenge

Many research domains talk about the importance of multi-disciplinary research and the need to share data, but there are major challenges for data providers in supporting such research. Domain expertise and collaborative scientific work requires that data and methods are effectively shared. This emphasises the importance of provenance and processing metadata, in addition to the typical metadata requirements.

The methods and processing required to integrate this data and optimise it for multi-disciplinary use have been thoroughly documented, and can be accessed, by the researchers through an extension to the granular data documentation of the ESS, providing a unique degree of transparency. Results show the needed form of interoperability at several levels:

A provenance description application prototype application has been developed in order to make the full data integration workflow transparent.

The EOSC Future added value

In addition:

Main results

The new ESS Labs service is highlighting the findings of the project on all levels:

Access to data

Provenance description application prototype

Papers and publications

Other resources