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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 is to facilitate the task of combining data from different domains to facilitate multi-disciplinary research.

This project wants to contribute to this Horizon science mission by combining resources from 2 Science Clusters. As part of the SSHOC consortium, ESS collects 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.

Technical challenge

Many 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: organisational, scientific, semantic, and technical. 

Main results

SSHOC and ENVRI FAIR have undertaken a case study to explore the practical aspects of supporting multi-disciplinary research, and have prototyped an application combining air quality data from the EEA, climate data from Copernicus, and social data from the ESS.

There is a new ESS Labs service highlighting the findings of the project on all levels, which is made available through the EOSC Portal. It would be a crucial resource in the EOSC catalogue, promoting interoperability and connectivity between the science clusters, the Smart Cities marketplace and EOSC.

Other resources