[{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"Our new paper has just been published in SoftwareX:\n\u0026ldquo;mcp-fdsnws-event: An MCP gateway for FDSNWS-Event web services\u0026rdquo;, by Valentino Lauciani and Daniele Bailo.\nThe paper presents mcp-fdsnws-event, an open-source software component that creates a bridge between standard services used by the seismological community and the emerging ecosystem of applications based on Large Language Models and AI agents.\nThe starting point is simple.\nFor many years, the seismological community has used the FDSN Web Services standard to query earthquake catalogues and retrieve information about seismic events. These services are robust, interoperable and widely adopted, but using them normally requires knowledge of APIs, query parameters and formats such as QuakeML.\nWith mcp-fdsnws-event, the same services are exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an emerging standard that allows AI systems to discover and use tools and data sources in a structured way.\nIn practice, an AI agent can use the software to answer requests such as:\n\u0026ldquo;Find earthquakes with magnitude above 3 in Central Italy during the last month\u0026rdquo;\nand transform that request into real queries against existing seismological infrastructures.\nThe server provides tools to search for events and retrieve detailed information about origins, magnitudes, seismic phase arrivals and focal mechanisms, using data from FDSN-compatible datacentres such as INGV, EMSC, GFZ and USGS.\nWhy it is interesting The innovative aspect, in my view, is not simply that we built a new interface to a seismic catalogue.\nThe point is rather to connect two ecosystems that, until now, have spoken different languages.\nOn one side, we have mature scientific infrastructures built over many years around shared standards such as FDSNWS and QuakeML.\nOn the other side, AI agents and conversational interfaces are emerging, with the ability to reason, use external tools and dynamically combine different sources of information.\nMCP can be one of the mechanisms through which these two worlds meet.\nThe software does not replace existing standards and does not replicate data. On the contrary, it makes existing scientific services directly usable by AI agents, while preserving the connection with authoritative infrastructures and data sources.\nA second important element is interoperability: the same interface can query different FDSN datacentres, avoiding the need to build specific integrations for each provider.\nFinally, the project was designed as a reusable software component: it is containerised, also available through an OpenAPI/REST wrapper, and accompanied by unit tests, integration tests and tools to verify agent behaviour in multi-turn interactions.\nA small component of a broader transformation This work belongs to a question that I find especially important for scientific infrastructures:\nhow can we make scientific data FAIR and interoperable not only for people and traditional applications, but also for AI agents?\nIf agents increasingly become a new interface through which researchers and citizens access data, it will be important to avoid having these systems rely only on knowledge embedded inside models.\nThey must be able to query authoritative, up-to-date and verifiable scientific sources.\nmcp-fdsnws-event is a small step in this direction: enabling an AI agent not merely to \u0026ldquo;know something about earthquakes\u0026rdquo;, but to directly query the services of the seismological community.\nPaper V. Lauciani, D. Bailo, \u0026ldquo;mcp-fdsnws-event: An MCP gateway for FDSNWS-Event web services\u0026rdquo;, SoftwareX (2026).\nDOI: 10.1016/j.softx.2026.103001\nThe code is open source and available in the INGV mcp-fdsnws-event repository, distributed under the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence.\nTransparency note: the drafting of this article was supported by generative artificial intelligence. The content was subsequently reviewed, verified and approved by the author.\n","date":"2026-09-10","image":"/en/news/a-new-bridge-between-ai-agents-and-seismological-data-mcp-fdsnws-event/images/softwarex-mcp-fdsnws-event_hu_a5acdc287b9244b0.png","month":"2026-09","permalink":"/en/news/a-new-bridge-between-ai-agents-and-seismological-data-mcp-fdsnws-event/","summary":"Our new paper has just been published in SoftwareX:\n“mcp-fdsnws-event: An MCP gateway for FDSNWS-Event web services”, by Valentino Lauciani and Daniele Bailo.\nThe paper presents mcp-fdsnws-event, an open-source software component that creates a bridge between standard services used by the seismological community and the emerging ecosystem of applications based on Large Language Models and AI agents.\nThe starting point is simple.\nFor many years, the seismological community has used the FDSN Web Services standard to query earthquake catalogues and retrieve information about seismic events. These services are robust, interoperable and widely adopted, but using them normally requires knowledge of APIs, query parameters and formats such as QuakeML.\n","tags":["artificial-intelligence","mcp","seismology","fdsn","softwarex","open-source","geoscience"],"title":"A new bridge between AI agents and seismological data: mcp-fdsnws-event"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"What generative artificial intelligence can teach us about machines, intelligence and, perhaps, ourselves.\nArtificial intelligence writes texts, generates images, produces software, solves problems and sustains increasingly convincing conversations.\nBut does all this mean that machines are truly intelligent?\nThis is the question at the heart of my article “Dentro la mente dell’intelligenza artificiale” (Inside the Mind of Artificial Intelligence), published in the July-August 2026 issue of Sapere.\nIt is an apparently simple question, but one that contains many others.\nWhat Do We Mean by Intelligence? One initial difficulty is that we do not have a universally accepted definition of intelligence, even when we are talking about human beings.\nIs it the ability to solve problems? To learn? To adapt? To communicate? To understand the world, ourselves and others?\nSince Alan Turing’s celebrated work in 1950, computer science has often adopted a pragmatic shortcut: instead of asking whether a machine really thinks, we can ask whether it is capable of behaving as if it were thinking.\nWith modern Large Language Models, this distinction has become increasingly difficult to perceive.\nThese systems converse, explain, argue and sometimes even seem to reason. Yet behind this linguistic behaviour we find mathematical models that learn statistical regularities from enormous quantities of data.\nThey can therefore display intelligent behaviour without necessarily understanding what they are doing.\nActing Without Understanding This apparent paradox is one of the central themes of the article.\nContemporary artificial intelligence did not emerge by faithfully reproducing the workings of the human mind. Neural networks, statistical learning and language models have instead found effective engineering shortcuts for producing behaviours that resemble some forms of human intelligence.\nTo use Luciano Floridi’s expression, these systems can agere sine intellegere: act without understanding.\nThis does not make their achievements any less extraordinary. On the contrary, it may be one of the most interesting aspects of current technological development.\nIt does, however, require us to be cautious when attributing typically human categories to machines: understanding, intentionality, consciousness and will.\nHuman Intelligence Is More Than Computation The comparison becomes even more interesting when we shift our attention from machines to ourselves.\nHuman intelligence does not seem to be simply the result of a powerful information-processing system contained within the brain. Language, perception, memory, emotions, relationships and interaction with the physical world all contribute to what we call intelligence.\nFrom Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences to the perspectives of embodied cognition, a long tradition in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience suggests that thought cannot easily be separated from the body and the world in which that body lives.\nArtificial intelligence is something different.\nIt has no biological history, metabolism or lived experience. Its environment consists primarily of data, algorithms and computational infrastructures built by us.\nPerhaps, then, the point is not to ask how quickly machines are becoming similar to human beings.\nWe may instead be witnessing the emergence of forms of intelligence different from our own, with their own characteristics and limitations.\nThe Question Is Ultimately About Us This leads to what I consider the most important question.\nPerhaps we should stop asking only:\n“Is artificial intelligence really intelligent?”\nand start asking:\n“What are we willing to delegate to it?”\nArtificial intelligence systems are increasingly entering decision-making processes in science, healthcare, finance, public administration and access to information.\nAlgorithms are not neutral objects, however: they incorporate objectives, criteria, data and choices made by human beings.\nThe challenge is therefore not merely technological.\nIt is also ethical and, ultimately, anthropological.\nUnderstanding artificial intelligence inevitably means questioning what we mean by intelligence, responsibility, understanding and human autonomy.\nAnd this may be one of the most interesting aspects of the current AI revolution: by trying to understand increasingly sophisticated machines, we may end up understanding ourselves a little better.\nThe full article, “Dentro la mente dell’intelligenza artificiale”, is freely available on SapereScienza.\nRead the full article on SapereScienza →\n","date":"2026-08-27","image":"https://www.saperescienza.it/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/thedigitalartist-technology-4205276.jpg","month":"2026-08","permalink":"/en/news/are-artificial-intelligences-really-intelligent/","summary":"What generative artificial intelligence can teach us about machines, intelligence and, perhaps, ourselves.\nArtificial intelligence writes texts, generates images, produces software, solves problems and sustains increasingly convincing conversations.\nBut does all this mean that machines are truly intelligent?\nThis is the question at the heart of my article “Dentro la mente dell’intelligenza artificiale” (Inside the Mind of Artificial Intelligence), published in the July-August 2026 issue of Sapere.\nIt is an apparently simple question, but one that contains many others.\n","tags":["artificial-intelligence","ai","ethics","philosophy"],"title":"Are Artificial Intelligences Really Intelligent?"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"Whoever governs knowledge also governs Artificial Intelligence.\nArtificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the strategic technologies that will shape science, industry, and public institutions over the coming decades. Discussions often focus on which language model performs best or which company will release the next breakthrough. Yet a more fundamental question is emerging:\nWho governs the knowledge on which AI systems rely?\nOur new paper, published in Earth Science Informatics, argues that trustworthy scientific AI cannot depend solely on increasingly capable language models. It also requires a new way of governing scientific knowledge.\nFrom Language Models to Knowledge Governance Large Language Models are powerful general-purpose tools. However, when used in scientific contexts, they frequently face a familiar problem: they generate answers based on statistical patterns rather than on institutionally validated knowledge.\nRetrieval-Augmented Generation, commonly known as RAG, has become a popular solution because it grounds AI responses in external documents. Nevertheless, simply connecting a model to a collection of documents does not automatically guarantee trustworthy scientific answers.\nThe quality of an AI system ultimately depends on the quality, provenance, and governance of the knowledge it retrieves.\nResearcher-Curated Knowledge Governance In our work, we introduce the concept of Researcher-Curated Knowledge Governance.\nThe central idea is straightforward: researchers should not only produce scientific knowledge, but also actively curate, validate, organize, and govern the knowledge that feeds AI systems.\nKnowledge therefore becomes an institutional asset rather than an uncontrolled collection of documents.\nThis approach can make AI systems more transparent, reproducible, and auditable, while preserving scientific quality and institutional responsibility.\nThe RockGPT Approach To demonstrate this idea, we developed RockGPT, a platform designed for the geosciences.\nRockGPT combines:\nopen-source Large Language Models; Retrieval-Augmented Generation; researcher-curated scientific knowledge; institutional deployment on self-hosted infrastructure. The objective is not simply to answer questions, but to ensure that answers are grounded in trusted scientific sources selected and maintained by domain experts.\nAverage model scores for the baseline and RAG-enhanced configurations (Figure 4).\nWhy This Matters for Europe The debate on European AI sovereignty often concentrates on developing new foundation models.\nOur work suggests that sovereignty extends beyond the model itself.\nTrue sovereignty also means controlling scientific knowledge, infrastructure, governance processes, and data.\nThis perspective is particularly relevant for European research infrastructures such as EPOS, where FAIR data, trusted scientific resources, and institutional governance already provide strong foundations for building reliable and sovereign AI services.\nRather than merely replicating commercial AI platforms, Europe has an opportunity to build AI ecosystems that reflect its own values: openness, transparency, scientific rigour, institutional accountability, and public responsibility.\nThe goal may not be to build the largest model.\nIt may be to build the most trustworthy ecosystem.\nLooking Ahead Researcher-Curated Knowledge Governance is not intended as a replacement for Large Language Models.\nInstead, it provides a governance framework that enables these models to become more reliable scientific assistants.\nAs AI becomes increasingly integrated into research, the decisive question will no longer be only how intelligent a model is, but also who governs the knowledge behind it.\nThat, we believe, is where trustworthy scientific AI truly begins.\nPaper Researcher-Curated Knowledge Governance for Trustworthy Scientific AI in the Geosciences: the RockGPT Approach\nPublished in Earth Science Informatics.\nhttps://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12145-026-02197-5\nTransparency note: the drafting of this blog post was supported by generative artificial intelligence. The content was subsequently reviewed, verified, and approved by the author.\n","date":"2026-08-06","image":"https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs12145-026-02197-5/MediaObjects/12145_2026_2197_Fig4_HTML.png","month":"2026-08","permalink":"/en/news/can-europe-build-truly-sovereign-ai/","summary":"Whoever governs knowledge also governs Artificial Intelligence.\nArtificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming one of the strategic technologies that will shape science, industry, and public institutions over the coming decades. Discussions often focus on which language model performs best or which company will release the next breakthrough. Yet a more fundamental question is emerging:\nWho governs the knowledge on which AI systems rely?\nOur new paper, published in Earth Science Informatics, argues that trustworthy scientific AI cannot depend solely on increasingly capable language models. It also requires a new way of governing scientific knowledge.\n","tags":["artificial-intelligence","ai-sovereignty","trustworthy-ai","scientific-ai","knowledge-governance","rockgpt","geoscience","epos"],"title":"Can Europe Build Truly Sovereign AI?"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"I am pleased to share an introduction to the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring its applications in everyday life as well as in scientific and technological contexts.\nThe seminar examines the fundamental principles that guide AI development, with a focus on advanced technologies such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning, and discusses the differences between generative and traditional AI. It also offers space for reflection on the ethical and environmental aspects of AI use, in line with the European regulatory framework and the challenges ahead.\nThe session is designed to establish the theoretical and practical foundations for a conscious and responsible use of these technologies.\nhttps://youtu.be/H9ZXx_BBLDI?si=24MIcwpJTw5ba0Pl\n","date":"2025-05-08","image":"/en/news/introduzione-allintelligenza-artificiale-applicazioni-fondamenti-e-sfide-etiche/images/Screenshot-2025-05-08-alle-10.56.00_hu_e48551f40fc453c7.png","month":"2025-05","permalink":"/en/news/introduzione-allintelligenza-artificiale-applicazioni-fondamenti-e-sfide-etiche/","summary":"I am pleased to share an introduction to the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring its applications in everyday life as well as in scientific and technological contexts.\nThe seminar examines the fundamental principles that guide AI development, with a focus on advanced technologies such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning, and discusses the differences between generative and traditional AI. It also offers space for reflection on the ethical and environmental aspects of AI use, in line with the European regulatory framework and the challenges ahead.\n","tags":["big-data","artificial-intelligence","job","tecnology-ict"],"title":"Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: Applications, Foundations, and Ethical Challenges"},{"categories":[],"content":"Ho aperto questa sezione per raccogliere aggiornamenti rapidi su ciò che sto facendo come tecnologo INGV e IT Officer di EPOS-ERIC:\nnote operative sui progetti europei e nazionali collegamenti a talk o pubblicazioni in uscita brevi diari tecnici su strumenti, dataset e integrazioni In questo modo posso mantenere il sito leggero e aggiornato senza passare da WordPress.\n","date":"2024-12-12","image":"","month":"2024-12","permalink":"/en/news/2024-12-12-bentornato-blog/","summary":"Ho aperto questa sezione per raccogliere aggiornamenti rapidi su ciò che sto facendo come tecnologo INGV e IT Officer di EPOS-ERIC:\nnote operative sui progetti europei e nazionali collegamenti a talk o pubblicazioni in uscita brevi diari tecnici su strumenti, dataset e integrazioni In questo modo posso mantenere il sito leggero e aggiornato senza passare da WordPress.\n","tags":["aggiornamenti","progetti"],"title":"Nuova sezione News"},{"categories":["job"],"content":" In November 2023, Nature Scientific Data published a scientific article presenting the data integration and computer science work that I carried out over the last 10 years together with a team of truly excellent colleagues. The article presents an initiative that is changing the way we approach Earth-science research in Europe: the EPOS Data Portal. In this post, I will explain in accessible terms what makes this multidisciplinary platform so special.\nThe European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is not just an international initiative; it is a vision that is redefining Earth science in Europe. This pioneering research infrastructure has built a unique collaborative environment where the sharing and use of scientific data are encouraged, supported, and carefully managed. Open Data, in its purest spirit, allows everyone, scientists, policy makers, experts, and citizens, to access information freely. By adhering to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), EPOS is becoming a European reference point and a symbol of open and interoperable access to data. This approach not only opens new doors to knowledge, but is also a fundamental step toward more inclusive, collaborative, and innovative scientific research.\nThe role of the Data Portal is crucial: it is the beating heart of an ambitious enterprise that is changing the scientific research landscape. This platform represents a genuine revolution in the integration, access, and use of Earth-science data. Its strength lies in its multidisciplinary nature, which allows data from more than 250 different sources to be aggregated, offering a panoramic view of the Earth as never before. This extraordinary feature turns the Data Portal into a place where researchers, scientists, and professionals from various disciplines can access a vast wealth of information, while also collaborating and creating new synergies. In this way, the EPOS Data Portal goes beyond a simple data platform and becomes an incubator of ideas and discoveries, contributing significantly to our understanding of planet Earth.\nAt the beginning, this undertaking seemed impossible. Data as different as maps, file lists, and waveforms, each with different formats and different access standards. The dream of creating a portal seemed like pure utopia. But the continuous search for innovative solutions eventually produced results across several dimensions: first, technically, through the adoption of an innovative distributed architecture; second, at community level, through a community of around 1,000 people, including scientists, developers, engineers, computer scientists, data experts, and managers, brought together through intense meetings, community building, and innovative approaches such as shape-up; and finally, through continuous work at European level to ensure the sustainability of the infrastructure by participating in European projects and initiatives. The EPOS Data Portal architecture is the foundation on which this innovative open-source platform rests. In addition to being inspired by state-of-the-art principles for multi-tier architectures, such as the microservices approach, it implements three key principles in a single innovative system: a) the use of rich, standards-based metadata, which allow resources to be described to the centralized system while leaving data ownership and management fully under the responsibility of data providers; b) service-based data access, which makes it possible to concentrate distributed resources from across the European continent in a single central hub, the EPOS Portal; c) the use of semantics, which assigns meaning and context to data and informs the central system about how data should be integrated on the map.\nAs an open-source platform, the EPOS Data Portal opens the door to innovation and collaboration. It makes available to the global developer community software developed through 10 years of experience in data integration for solid Earth sciences, not only by software developers but by the entire scientific community actively involved in defining the portal\u0026rsquo;s features and functionalities, ensuring that it responds to real user needs.\nFor the scientific community, the EPOS Data Portal is a valuable resource that simplifies access to and use of Earth-science data for multidisciplinary studies. It allows users to visualize combined data such as hazard maps, earthquakes from the last month, active faults in a specific region, and satellite images showing vertical displacement of the Earth\u0026rsquo;s surface. This integration of multidisciplinary data provides a comprehensive view of seismic hazards in a region, helping us understand the processes that generate risk factors that can cause natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.\nFor politicians and decision makers, multidisciplinary data can, in the long term, support informed decisions for safety and spatial planning.\nThe EPOS Data Portal is destined to grow further. The direction is toward the exploitation of Big Data through Machine Learning and AI techniques. Planned developments include expanding the portal\u0026rsquo;s functionalities to enable advanced analysis, processing, and visualization of scientific data. This will open new opportunities for scientific discovery and innovation.\nThe article in Nature Scientific Data represents only the beginning of a revolution in Earth science driven by the EPOS Data Portal. This platform transforms the way we access and use data, opening new doors for research and collaboration. Imagine a future in which scientists, policy makers, and citizens draw on this vast resource to address the challenges of our planet: to access geological or seismic-hazard maps, or to understand whether the house they are buying will be safe in the long term. With the expansion toward Machine Learning and AI techniques applied to the Big Data integrated in the portal, EPOS is preparing to guide scientists toward potentially revolutionary discoveries. This exciting journey belongs to everyone, scientists, experts, and ordinary citizens, as we move toward a deeper understanding of our world and our planet.\nWhat are your impressions of the role of the EPOS Data Portal in Earth science? Are there aspects that make you curious or that you would like to explore further? I invite you to leave your comments and questions below, to enrich the dialogue on this topic.\n","date":"2023-11-23","image":"/en/news/linnovazione-nel-mondo-della-scienza-della-terra-il-portale-dati-epos/images/Schermata-2023-11-22-alle-14.42.55-e1700660675319_hu_d70e8bdfbe1c73a7.png","month":"2023-11","permalink":"/en/news/linnovazione-nel-mondo-della-scienza-della-terra-il-portale-dati-epos/","summary":" In November 2023, Nature Scientific Data published a scientific article presenting the data integration and computer science work that I carried out over the last 10 years together with a team of truly excellent colleagues. The article presents an initiative that is changing the way we approach Earth-science research in Europe: the EPOS Data Portal. In this post, I will explain in accessible terms what makes this multidisciplinary platform so special.\nThe European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is not just an international initiative; it is a vision that is redefining Earth science in Europe. This pioneering research infrastructure has built a unique collaborative environment where the sharing and use of scientific data are encouraged, supported, and carefully managed. Open Data, in its purest spirit, allows everyone, scientists, policy makers, experts, and citizens, to access information freely. By adhering to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), EPOS is becoming a European reference point and a symbol of open and interoperable access to data. This approach not only opens new doors to knowledge, but is also a fundamental step toward more inclusive, collaborative, and innovative scientific research.\n","tags":["artificial-intelligence","big-data","computer-science","data-integration","earth-science-research","epos","fair-principles","infrastructure","machine-learning","open-data","science-communication"],"title":"Innovation in Earth Science: the EPOS Data Portal"},{"categories":["job"],"content":" I am pleased to share my latest paper, \u0026ldquo;Integrated access to multidisciplinary data through semantically interoperable services in a metadata-driven platform for Solid Earth Science.\u0026rdquo; The paper examines an innovative approach that combines metadata, semantics, and web services to achieve seamless data interoperability.\nA key discovery highlighted in the paper is the pivotal role of semantics at the data discovery level. The queries received by the main data integration system are mapped to specific queries using the semantic information associated with the data source. This ensures that data from various sources can be visualized in a unified format, enhancing the user experience. Link to the paper for detailed insights\nFurthermore, web services are dynamically adapted based on the data source to be integrated. The integration system interoperates with data sources implementing different web services, with details about these services stored, including their semantic information.\nI look forward to thoughts and feedback on this approach. Let us discuss and collaborate.\n","date":"2023-09-12","image":"/en/news/unlocking-true-interoperability-in-solid-earth-science-a-deep-dive-into-metadata-semantics-and-web-services/images/nasa-Q1p7bh3SHj8-unsplash-1-scaled_hu_830591b03e23ba0b.jpg","month":"2023-09","permalink":"/en/news/unlocking-true-interoperability-in-solid-earth-science-a-deep-dive-into-metadata-semantics-and-web-services/","summary":" I am pleased to share my latest paper, “Integrated access to multidisciplinary data through semantically interoperable services in a metadata-driven platform for Solid Earth Science.” The paper examines an innovative approach that combines metadata, semantics, and web services to achieve seamless data interoperability.\nA key discovery highlighted in the paper is the pivotal role of semantics at the data discovery level. The queries received by the main data integration system are mapped to specific queries using the semantic information associated with the data source. This ensures that data from various sources can be visualized in a unified format, enhancing the user experience. Link to the paper for detailed insights\n","tags":[],"title":"Unlocking True Interoperability in Solid Earth Science: A Deep Dive into Metadata, Semantics, and Web Services"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"This presentation, originally prepared in early 2020, describes an innovative Agile approach for enabling collaborative software development in international, distributed teams. It is particularly suited to EU projects and other international working groups. Please download the presentation, as it includes animations.\n","date":"2022-10-11","image":"/en/news/the-agile-shape-up-method-for-collaborative-developments-in-international-contextsa-lean-approach-for-epos/images/Schermata-2022-10-11-alle-12.29.04_hu_f492a42eab6ff946.png","month":"2022-10","permalink":"/en/news/the-agile-shape-up-method-for-collaborative-developments-in-international-contextsa-lean-approach-for-epos/","summary":"This presentation, originally prepared in early 2020, describes an innovative Agile approach for enabling collaborative software development in international, distributed teams. It is particularly suited to EU projects and other international working groups. Please download the presentation, as it includes animations.\n","tags":["agile","agile-development","collaborative","shape-up","software-development"],"title":"The Agile Shape-up method for collaborative developments in international contexts:a lean approach for EPOS"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":" The EU is ideally positioned to take a global leadership role in the development of a cloud environment for science. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will be the virtual environment where multidisciplinary data, access infrastructures, and computing resources are made available to researchers and private-sector actors.\nEurope has long promoted the sharing of scientific research data, which should be remembered as an investment on which national governments and the European Community are spending substantial resources, in the order of billions of euros.\nBut how can we fully exploit the information and hidden value contained in data so that companies and researchers can create innovation?\nTo answer this question, Europe is investing in the construction of a European cloud: the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EOSC will provide the virtual environment where multidisciplinary data, access infrastructures, and computing resources are made available to researchers and private-sector actors.\nThe challenges involved in this effort are many and go far beyond the technical dimension. Governance, shared objectives, and community building currently appear to be the crucial aspects of an initiative that is too big to fail, and in which the Commission invested 250 million euros through research projects in the 2018-2020 period alone.\n[continue reading]\n","date":"2022-06-14","image":"/en/news/european-open-science-cloud-eosc-sfide-e-opportunita-cruciali-per-il-futuro-della-ricerca-ue/images/trend-micro-1280x720.jpg_hu_e9c194b80d38c0aa.webp","month":"2022-06","permalink":"/en/news/european-open-science-cloud-eosc-sfide-e-opportunita-cruciali-per-il-futuro-della-ricerca-ue/","summary":" The EU is ideally positioned to take a global leadership role in the development of a cloud environment for science. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will be the virtual environment where multidisciplinary data, access infrastructures, and computing resources are made available to researchers and private-sector actors.\nEurope has long promoted the sharing of scientific research data, which should be remembered as an investment on which national governments and the European Community are spending substantial resources, in the order of billions of euros.\n","tags":["big-data","cloud-computing","european-commission","database","eosc","europe","european-open-science-cloud","research-infrastructures","research-infrastructures"],"title":"European Open Science Cloud (EOSC): Key Challenges and Opportunities for the Future of EU Research"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"I have been often asked by people outside of my domain what is my job.\nAs many jobs in the IT domain, it is a little bit difficult to explain what we do: it is quite technical and abstract. It has to do with structures that do not exist in reality. It has to do with planning, with considering sustainability of the envisaged activities. We work with bits, code, data structures, metadata, with management of huge IT objects and initiatives.\nEven most importantly, as EPOS is something completely new, it has much to do with setting up architectures and methodologies which do not exist yet. Most of the effort is dedicated to making things real on the basis of what discussed and decided in a collaborative way, rather than carrying out activities that are well established and tested since years.\nSo, not sure whether I can now answer straight to the burning question \u0026ldquo;Daniele, what\u0026rsquo;s your job\u0026rdquo;.\nHowever, everybody can now have a comprehensive overview of what EPOS is and what this wonderful enterprise, which has become a legal entity (an ERIC), is about with the \u0026ldquo;Special Issue: EPOS a Research Infrastructure in solid Earth: open science and innovation\u0026rdquo; from the Annals of Geophysics journal.\nIn particular, I would like to highlight four publications that are vital for understanding what EPOS is (and what is my job, hopefully :) )\n1. THE EPOS RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE: A FEDERATED APPROACH TO INTEGRATE SOLID EARTH SCIENCE DATA AND SERVICES This paper is an introduction to EPOS and provides an overall view of the initiative.\nAbstract. The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a Research Infrastructure (RI) committed to enabling excellent science through the integration, accessibility, use and re-use of solid Earth science data, research products and services, as well as by promoting physical access to research facilities. This article presents and describes the EPOS RI and introduces the contents of its Delivery Framework. In November 2018, EPOS ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) has been granted by the European Commission and was established to design and implement a long-term plan for the integration of research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe. Specifically, the EPOS mission is to create and operate a highly distributed and sustainable research infrastructure to provide coordinated access to harmonized, interoperable and quality-controlled data from diverse solid Earth science disciplines, together with tools for their use in analysis and modelling. EPOS relies on leading-edge e-science solutions and is committed to open access, thus enabling a step towards the change in multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary scientific research in Earth science. The EPOS architecture and its Delivery Framework are discussed in this article to present the contributions to open science and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data management, as well as to emphasize the community building process that supported the design, implementation and construction of the EPOS RI.\nCocco M, Freda C, Atakan K, Bailo D, Saleh-Contell K, Lange O, Michalek J. The EPOS Research Infrastructure: a federated approach to integrate solid Earth science data and services. Ann. Geophys. [Internet]. 2022Apr.29 [cited 2022May9];65(2):DM208.\n2. DATA INTEGRATION AND FAIR DATA MANAGEMENT IN SOLID EARTH SCIENCE This paper describes the technical implementation of EPOS also with reference to the FAIR principles.\nAbstract. Integrated use of multidisciplinary data is nowadays a recognized trend in scientific research, in particular in the domain of solid Earth science where the understanding of a physical process is improved and made complete by different types of measurements – for instance, ground acceleration, SAR imaging, crustal deformation – describing a physical phenomenon. FAIR principles are recognized as a means to foster data integration by providing a common set of criteria for building data stewardship systems for Open Science. However, the implementation of FAIR principles raises issues along dimensions like governance and legal beyond, of course, the technical one. In the latter, in particular, the development of FAIR data provision systems is often delegated to Research Infrastructures or data providers, with support in terms of metrics and best practices offered by cluster projects or dedicated initiatives. In the current work, we describe the approach to FAIR data management in the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), a distributed research infrastructure in the solid Earth science domain that includes more than 250 individual research infrastructures across 25 countries in Europe. We focus in particular on the technical aspects, but including also governance, policies and organizational elements, by describing the architecture of the EPOS delivery framework both from the organizational and technical point of view and by outlining the key principles used in the technical design. We describe how a combination of approaches, namely rich metadata and service-based systems design, are required to achieve data integration. We show the system architecture and the basic features of the EPOS data portal, that integrates data from more than 220 services in a FAIR way. The construction of such a portal was driven by the EPOS FAIR data management approach, that by defining a clear roadmap for compliance with the FAIR principles, produced a number of best practices and technical approaches for complying with the FAIR principles.\nSuch a work, that spans over a decade but concentrates the key efforts in the last 5 years with the EPOS Implementation Phase project and the establishment of EPOS-ERIC, was carried out in synergy with other EU initiatives dealing with FAIR data. On the basis of the EPOS experience, future directions are outlined, emphasizing the need to provide i) FAIR reference architectures that can ease data practitioners and engineers from the domain communities to adopt FAIR principles and build FAIR data systems; ii) a FAIR data management framework addressing FAIR through the entire data lifecycle, including reproducibility and provenance; and iii) the extension of the FAIR principles to policies and governance dimensions.\nBailo D, Jeffery KG, Atakan K, Trani L, Paciello R, Vinciarelli V, Michalek J, Spinuso A. Data integration and FAIR data management in Solid Earth Science. Ann. Geophys. [Internet]. 2022Apr.29 [cited 2022May9];65(2):DM210.\n3. LONG-TERM SUSTAINABILITY OF A DISTRIBUTED RI: THE EPOS CASE This paper describes the approach of EPOS to sustainability, and remarks the importance of the community building process.\nAbstract. The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a Research Infrastructure (RI) committed to enabling excellent science through the integration, accessibility, use and re-use of solid Earth science data, research products and services, as well as by promoting physical access to research facilities. This article presents and describes the EPOS RI and introduces the contents of its Delivery Framework. In November 2018, EPOS ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) has been granted by the European Commission and was established to design and implement a long-term plan for the integration of research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe. Specifically, the EPOS mission is to create and operate a highly distributed and sustainable research infrastructure to provide coordinated access to harmonized, interoperable and quality-controlled data from diverse solid Earth science disciplines, together with tools for their use in analysis and modelling. EPOS relies on leading-edge e-science solutions and is committed to open access, thus enabling a step towards the change in multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary scientific research in Earth science. The EPOS architecture and its Delivery Framework are discussed in this article to present the contributions to open science and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data management, as well as to emphasize the community building process that supported the design, implementation and construction of the EPOS RI.\nSaleh Contell K, Karlzén K, Cocco M, Pedersen HA, Atakan K, Bailo D, Lange O, Mercurio D, Maracchia G, Piras D, Sangianantoni A, Fredella M, Freda C. Long-term sustainability of a distributed RI: the EPOS case. Ann. Geophys. .\n4. COORDINATED AND INTEROPERABLE SEISMOLOGICAL DATA AND PRODUCT SERVICES IN EUROPE: THE EPOS THEMATIC CORE SERVICE FOR SEISMOLOGY This paper describes how the EPOS Seismological community is organized for a unified and comprehensive provision of seismological data, products ad services at European Scale.\nAbstract. In this article we describe EPOS Seismology, the Thematic Core Service consortium for the seismology domain within the European Plate Observing System infrastructure. EPOS Seismology was developed alongside the build-up of EPOS during the last decade, in close collaboration between the existing pan-European seismological initiatives ORFEUS (Observatories and Research Facilities for European Seismology), EMSC (Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center) and EFEHR (European Facilities for Earthquake Hazard and Risk) and their respective communities. It provides on one hand a governance framework that allows a well-coordinated interaction of the seismological community services with EPOS and its bodies, and on the other hand it strengthens the coordination among the already existing seismological initiatives with regard to data, products and service provisioning and further development. Within the EPOS Delivery Framework, ORFEUS, EMSC and EFEHR provide a wide range of services that allow open access to a vast amount of seismological data and products, following and implementing the FAIR principles and supporting open science. Services include access to raw seismic waveforms of thousands of stations together with relevant station and data quality information, parametric earthquake information of recent and historical earthquakes together with advanced event-specific products like moment tensors or source models and further ancillary services, and comprehensive seismic hazard and risk information, covering latest European scale models and their underlying data. The services continue to be available on the well-established domain-specific platforms and websites, and are also consecutively integrated with the interoperable central EPOS data infrastructure. EPOS Seismology and its participating organizations provide a consistent framework for the future development of these services and their operation as EPOS services, closely coordinated also with other international seismological initiatives, and is well set to represent the European seismological research infrastructures and their stakeholders within EPOS.\nHaslinger F, Basili R, Bossu R, Cauzzi C, Cotton F, Crowley H, Custodio S, Danciu L, Locati M, Michelini A, Molinari I, Ottemöller L, Parolai S. Coordinated and Interoperable Seismological Data and Product Services in Europe: the EPOS Thematic Core Service for Seismology. Ann. Geophys.\n","date":"2022-05-10","image":"/en/news/what-is-epos-4-publications-to-get-a-grasp-on-what-epos-eric-is-and-does/images/Schermata-2022-05-09-alle-12.13.03-e1652091342824_hu_9ee0513b918b55b7.png","month":"2022-05","permalink":"/en/news/what-is-epos-4-publications-to-get-a-grasp-on-what-epos-eric-is-and-does/","summary":"I have been often asked by people outside of my domain what is my job.\nAs many jobs in the IT domain, it is a little bit difficult to explain what we do: it is quite technical and abstract. It has to do with structures that do not exist in reality. It has to do with planning, with considering sustainability of the envisaged activities. We work with bits, code, data structures, metadata, with management of huge IT objects and initiatives.\n","tags":["annals-of-geophysics","epos","fair-data","geology","publications","research-infrastructure","solid-earh"],"title":"What is EPOS? 4 Publications to get a grasp on what EPOS ERIC is and does"},{"categories":["job","reflections"],"content":"3 Open Positions Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia EPOS – European Plate Observing system We are looking for three IT technician profiles to contribute to the development of an innovative European research infrastructure aimed at integrating data from the solid Earth sciences (https://www.epos-eu.org/). Integration takes place through the EPOS Data Portal, a platform that allows users to search, download, and analyze data from scientific communities through a single map-based web interface using geolocated data.\nThe contract duration is one year, renewable if the collaboration is successful. The position will be classified under the professional profile of Collaboratore Tecnico Enti di Ricerca (level VI).\nWork location: Rome.\nSalary The annual gross salary for CTER level VI positions is governed by the current national contract and is approximately 31,000 euros gross per year. The net amount obviously depends on the candidate\u0026rsquo;s fiscal situation, but it is indicatively around 1,500 euros net per month.\nRequirements The call is open to candidates with a high-school diploma, and graduates are also welcome. The required skills include one or more of the following:\nsoftware development using Java for web-oriented applications; use of versioning systems, for example GitLab and Continuous Integration; design, creation, and management of relational databases; knowledge of the main non-relational databases; use of Unix-like systems; use of the main software development tools, for example Eclipse and Visual Studio. Is this job for you? This job is for you if you want to work in a dynamic environment, if you are eager to learn and move across different technologies and methods in order to achieve team objectives, and if you are not afraid to engage with the team to help it reach its goals. It is for you if you are a software developer with Java skills, knowledge of relational databases, and/or a junior system administrator interested in cloud computing, the creation of geolocated systems, and more generally the exploration of new technologies applied creatively to problem solving.\nApplication To apply for the position, follow the instructions in Article 4 of the call available at this link:\nhttps://amministrazione-trasparente.ingv.it/web/trasparenza/papca-p?p_p_id=jcitygovalbopubblicazioni_WAR_jcitygovalbiportlet\u0026amp;p_p_lifecycle=2\u0026amp;p_p_state=pop_up\u0026amp;p_p_mode=view\u0026amp;p_p_resource_id=downloadAllegato\u0026amp;p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage\u0026amp;_jcitygovalbopubblicazioni_WAR_jcitygovalbiportlet_downloadSigned=false\u0026amp;_jcitygovalbopubblicazioni_WAR_jcitygovalbiportlet_id=4037826\u0026amp;_jcitygovalbopubblicazioni_WAR_jcitygovalbiportlet_action=mostraDettaglio\u0026amp;_jcitygovalbopubblicazioni_WAR_jcitygovalbiportlet_fromAction=recuperaDettaglio\n","date":"2022-03-30","image":"/en/news/ingv-epos-assume-tecnico-informatico-2/images/eric-logo_hu_3570ebafa5516d9b.png","month":"2022-03","permalink":"/en/news/ingv-epos-assume-tecnico-informatico-2/","summary":"3 Open Positions Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia EPOS – European Plate Observing system We are looking for three IT technician profiles to contribute to the development of an innovative European research infrastructure aimed at integrating data from the solid Earth sciences (https://www.epos-eu.org/). Integration takes place through the EPOS Data Portal, a platform that allows users to search, download, and analyze data from scientific communities through a single map-based web interface using geolocated data.\n","tags":["hiring","ingv","job-openings"],"title":"INGV Is Hiring 3 IT Technicians for the EPOS Platform"},{"categories":["job"],"content":"Facing reality There is a truth that we are all reluctant to admit: many EU funded initiatives in the research domain aim at producing software-related deliverables, but when coming to the real day-to-day work, releasing even small piece of working software is very challenging. Project partners have different approaches, different technical practices, different off-the-shelf software products that need to be harmonized or sometimes divergent ideas and different cultural backgrounds. That’s the beauty and the challenge of EU initiatives. COVID-19 made things even worse by hindering the possibility of having face to face meetings, where - everybody knows but just a few people say it – agreements and decisions are taken in \u0026ldquo;social\u0026rdquo; contexts (yes, I mean coffee breaks and working dinners).\nAs a result, ambitious deliverables, when confronted with reality, are often re-framed to demonstrators or proof of concepts requiring additional work to become usable and appealing for the entire technical-scientific community they were designed for. There can be many reasons for the above not uncommon scenario, but three seems to have considerable weight: different approaches to human resources management, different technical practices, different development methods. It is therefore a matter of finding a convergence between the software development life cycle process (Sommerville, I., 2011) and the way persons are managed.\nWhy do deadlines slip over Although in the latest decade Agile development methodologies (Cockburn, A., 2006) have gained popularity – and this partially makes collaborative developments easier because of a common background – still the problem of not being able to deliver in EU initiatives exists because when planning the developments, most methodologies are still based on workflows including the definition of tasks as the first step, and fixing deadlines at the end. The concept of cycles may exist (like in the Agile method), but the sequence remains the same depicted in Fig. 1 \u0026ldquo;traditional\u0026rdquo; process.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_4572\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;672\u0026rdquo;] Figure 1: T_raditional_ vs. Shape-up Software development life cycles[/caption]\nTo ease the planning, Gannt charts, staff allocation charts and other models can be used. Many online and offline software exists for this, responding to the need of having a clear definition of tasks (along with the full work or through an iteration) and of estimating the amount of work required to accomplish an activity. Although useful, they increase the work overhead in an already complex landscape like EU projects, where resources are already difficult to micro-manage and to organize internationally.\nWhat often happens, is that definition of tasks and resources allocation is done in a very detailed way, but when it comes to deadlines difficulties are encountered because each institution in the project has its own priorities and internal organization. It is unrealistic to claim that an international group of developers, each of which is under the control of a different organization, can work in a harmonized way. It simply does not work. And deadlines are often not respected, with an increasing feeling of developments going on and on, with no end in sight.\nIs there light at the end of the tunnel? Yes. So, is there any hope of converging towards a more efficient way of planning and managing developments? The answer is yes, according to the guys of basecamp (https://basecamp.com/). After years of experience in the field in a cross-countries context, they elaborated a methodology called shape-up. It works well for private companies and can be readapted easily for research contexts.\nShape-up is described in detail in this book (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) which is free for download. It is based upon the following key concepts:\n#1 (Cyclic) Deadlines first. Let’s be realistic. Deadlines are the problem. Everybody gets excited when planning the work (I myself have plenty of detailed spreadsheets with resources allocation, lost somewhere in my laptop folders), but actually doing it and respecting deadlines in a context where salaries are not strictly linked to the release of operational software, is another story. Activities are not interrupted of course, but these have troubles in producing expected deliverables in a given amount of time.\nHere is where the shape-up method sounds revolutionary: it firstly sets the deadlines. Developers know that after a certain period they will be asked to show what they produced. This ensures that a deliverable will be there. Not respecting deadlines is a taboo. The guys of basecamp even consider dropping an activity if it produces no result in a workcycle. Fig1 \u0026ldquo;shape up\u0026rdquo; process shows the differences with the traditional way of managing the development workflow.\n#2 Shaping the work instead of task micro-management Defining all tasks in advance has the advantage of clarity. However, it is a huge overhead in terms of preliminary planning and monitoring of activities while the work is ongoing. In addition, many developers cannot express their creativity because they feel like they must execute pre-defined receipts. The shape-up method does not require defining all tasks beforehand but to shape up the work, that is to say, draw the boundaries of the work to be done, depict the main elements of the GUI and basic architecture, and define the no-gos or potential rabbit holes. Then it is up to the ability and creativity of small teams of developers to manage it in the given time (deadlines are fixed in advance!). Shaping-up is done by means of pitches: they are structured presentations of the proposed work that include the problem that piece of work aims at solving; the appetite raised by that specific development (e.g. how many cycles of developments does it deserve?); a preliminary rough design with potential solutions and embedded sketches; the definition of risks and rabbit holes that may drain time and resources; finally the no Gos, that is to say, what will not be developed in the work cycle.\n#3 Three steps workflow to production: Shaping, Betting, Building Of course, a method to manage all the processes is required. And it is surprisingly straightforward. The work is organized in work cycles, each of which lasts from 6 to 8 weeks. But this can of course be adapted to the international research context [1]. The first step is shaping the work: senior IT together with a pool of selected developers, those who are more informed about the overall architecture, produce pitches that are coherent with the existing framework.\nThen, and this is the fun part, everything is brought to a betting table, a board of IT managers that based on the available resources decide what pitches deserve to be implemented. The assumption is to be realistic about available resources, and this is a very crucial step.\nFinally, the Building phase, representing the well-known software development phase, is done with some specific tricks that developers should use. For instance, if the software architecture includes a front-end and a back-end, the development of new features should focus on one feature at a time and work in parallel on the front and back end, against doing all front-end work and then moving to the back-end. This ensures coherent developments and that the work gets done, at least for core features.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_4574\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;aligncenter\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;552\u0026rdquo;] Figure 2: main sections of a pitch document[/caption]\nShape up in reality The shape-up method has been tested and adapted in a real-life case, the European Plate Observing System pan-European initiative (https://www.epos-eu.org/), for managing the developments of the EPOS Data portal (https://www.epos-eu.org/dataportal) that include a core group of more than 20 developers, and a wider group of almost 100 developers across Europe. Some aspects had to be reviewed, for instance, the length of the work-cycles and the betting board – this required to set up a clear governance structure – but the method itself was not modified. The strongest tool is the pitching template in figure 2, which is agreed by all developers, enabled them to manage the developments. The key aspects of this use case will be the object of another post.\nWhere the shape up does not work Does shape up always for any context, any software development activity? Of course not.\nSome cases intrinsically need a long time and a different type of stakeholders. Designing a system is an example: it requires thinking about different approaches, studying existing models, communicating with the CEO and the management layer, leveraging on existing experience and potentially communicating with external experts. In this case, the design curve can be steeper and longer in time, especially when it does not make sense to provide only part of the architecture within a given timeline. Specific methodologies should be applied, but the main concepts of the shape up can still be reused.\nAnother case is when for any reason the availability of human resources cannot be defined at all beforehand. At the end of the day, planning requires relying upon developers availability. In some sad cases, the management of IT people in EU funded projects was not tackled appropriately, just relying on voluntary work by some technical persons.\nSo, while being very effective for many cases and contexts, shape-up cannot yet guarantee miracles to happen. As the old proverb says “We did the possible, we are now working on the impossible. For miracles, we are gearing up!”\nGet in touch We’d love to hear what you think of the proposed method and be happy to provide hints or support.\nAlso, we would also love to hear about your successes and challenges as you try to apply it to your teams and projects and compare experience and best practices.\nContact: Daniele Bailo daniele.bailo@ingv.it\nReferences Cockburn, A. (2006). Agile software development: the cooperative game. Pearson Education.\nSommerville, I. (2011). Software engineering 9th Edition. ISBN-10, 137035152, 18.\n[1] To be honest, the basecamp guys believe that 6-8 weeks is the optimal time range for private companies. In the experiments we did in EPOS, a three-month time range was found to be more reasonable.\n","date":"2021-12-21","image":"/en/news/managing-collaborative-software-developments-in-international-initiatives-how-to-optimize-resources-and-time/images/1_VrdVD3XNZFmjSLDRV5EwUQ_hu_bc09d037d8a476dc.png","month":"2021-12","permalink":"/en/news/managing-collaborative-software-developments-in-international-initiatives-how-to-optimize-resources-and-time/","summary":"Facing reality There is a truth that we are all reluctant to admit: many EU funded initiatives in the research domain aim at producing software-related deliverables, but when coming to the real day-to-day work, releasing even small piece of working software is very challenging. Project partners have different approaches, different technical practices, different off-the-shelf software products that need to be harmonized or sometimes divergent ideas and different cultural backgrounds. That’s the beauty and the challenge of EU initiatives. COVID-19 made things even worse by hindering the possibility of having face to face meetings, where - everybody knows but just a few people say it – agreements and decisions are taken in “social” contexts (yes, I mean coffee breaks and working dinners).\n","tags":["agile","epos","eu-projects","europe","international-initiatives","shape-up","software-development","teamwork"],"title":"Managing collaborative software developments in International Initiatives: how to optimize resources and time."},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"There are moments when, sometimes almost unexpectedly, you find yourself taking stock of all the work done in previous years.\nThat kind of meticulous work, made of small daily refinements and microscopic steps forward that you may not even notice. In fact, sometimes it feels as if you are standing still. Then opportunities arrive when\u0026hellip; BOOM\u0026hellip; everything is illuminated by a new light and the puzzle comes together.\nWhat emerges is a beautiful mosaic, with thousands of tiny tiles placed with patience and consistency.\nThis is what happened today during the presentation of the work carried out over the last few years at the ICT INGV 2021 meeting. It was work done with fantastic colleagues: some present from the beginning, others who arrived and left, others who have just come on board. A remarkable team effort, one we can be proud of.\nSo what was done? Below I report the abstract and presentation as presented at the conference.\nThe presentation is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5552787\nAbstract\nThe integration of resources distributed across different European data centers and research infrastructures has become, over the last decade, a necessary step for efficiently conducting multidisciplinary research in the field of Earth sciences.\nThe integration of heterogeneous resources requires, on the one hand, \u0026ldquo;transparent access to shared knowledge and data\u0026rdquo;, which is one definition of \u0026ldquo;Open Science\u0026rdquo; [1], from open data providers. On the other hand, it requires data providers to manage data through technological infrastructures developed in accordance with the FAIR principles [2].\nWithin this framework, EPOS (www.epos-eu.org), the European Plate Observing System, is positioned as a pan-European research infrastructure on the ESFRI roadmap (European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures), and has recently been granted ERIC status (European Research Infrastructure Consortium).\nEPOS aims to integrate the different European research infrastructures for solid Earth science according to the FAIR principles.\nThe architecture enabling this integration consists of two main layers: on one side, an integration node accessible through the EPOS Data Portal; on the other, the TCSs (Thematic Core Services), which provide data from specific scientific domains such as seismology, volcanology, satellite data, geodesy, anthropogenic hazards, geo-electromagnetism, geology, and near-fault observatories.\nThe integration node accessible from the EPOS Data Portal was designed according to the FAIR principles. It is easy to maintain and scale thanks to the adoption of a modular, atomic, and interoperable microservices approach. In particular, one of the keys to promoting interoperability is the use of rich metadata, implemented through two standards: EPOS-DCAT-AP [3] for metadata transfer, and CERIF [4] for metadata storage. The microservices approach was implemented using technologies such as RabbitMQ [5] to enable communication among individual microservices, and Docker for virtualization within a DevOps deployment method implemented with GitLab CI/CD [6].\nIn this contribution, we present an overview of the main technical aspects of the EPOS architecture, the general approach to data management, how the FAIR principles have been implemented, and a multidisciplinary use case demonstrating the integration of data and products through the EPOS Data Portal.\n[1] R. Vicente-Saez, C. Martinez-Fuentes, Open Science now: A systematic literature review for an integrated definition, J. Bus. Res. 88 (2018) 428-436. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.12.043\n[2] https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples\n[3] Luca Trani, Malcolm Atkinson, Daniele Bailo, Rossana Paciello, Rosa Filgueira Establishing Core Concepts for Information-Powered Collaborations,.. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 89, 2018, Pages 421-437, ISSN 0167-739X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.07.005\n[4] CERIF - the Common European Research Information Format - is a conceptual model describing the Research domain https://www.eurocris.org/eurocris_archive/cerifsupport.org/cerif-in-brief/index.html\n[5] https://www.rabbitmq.com/\n[6] Bailo D. et al., (2018). Integration of heterogeneous data, software and services in Solid Earth Sciences: the EPOS system design and roadmap for the building of Integrated Core Services. Rapp. Tec. INGV, 393: 1- 22, ISSN 2039-7941.\n","date":"2021-10-07","image":"/en/news/epos-data-portal-una-piattaforma-fair-per-laccesso-a-dati-e-servizi-multidisciplinari-delle-scienze-della-terra-solida/images/Schermata-2021-10-06-alle-16.27.59_hu_c438e33e991cb37e.png","month":"2021-10","permalink":"/en/news/epos-data-portal-una-piattaforma-fair-per-laccesso-a-dati-e-servizi-multidisciplinari-delle-scienze-della-terra-solida/","summary":"There are moments when, sometimes almost unexpectedly, you find yourself taking stock of all the work done in previous years.\nThat kind of meticulous work, made of small daily refinements and microscopic steps forward that you may not even notice. In fact, sometimes it feels as if you are standing still. Then opportunities arrive when… BOOM… everything is illuminated by a new light and the puzzle comes together.\nWhat emerges is a beautiful mosaic, with thousands of tiny tiles placed with patience and consistency.\n","tags":["database","epos","ict","ingv","research-infrastructure","science"],"title":"EPOS Data Portal: a FAIR Platform for Access to Multidisciplinary Data and Services in Solid Earth Sciences"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"Interview with Daniele Bailo, Zhiming Zhao, and Ari Asmi, who explain the key components forming the ENVRI-hub: the ENVRI Catalogue of Services, the ENVRI Knowledge Base, and the ENVRI Use Cases.\nDaniele, can you explain in more detail why\nthese three components are crucial to the ENVRI-hub?\nDaniele: These are three distinct but complementary\nelements used as containers to support the provision of\nheterogeneous datasets, services, and software within\nENVRI.\nRead full interview\nhttps://envri.eu/the-three-components-to-envri-hub-success/\n","date":"2021-06-01","image":"/en/news/the-three-components-to-envri-hub-success/images/image_editor_output_image1291013102-1622515575490_hu_7001e4fc907e361a.jpg","month":"2021-06","permalink":"/en/news/the-three-components-to-envri-hub-success/","summary":"Interview with Daniele Bailo, Zhiming Zhao, and Ari Asmi, who explain the key components forming the ENVRI-hub: the ENVRI Catalogue of Services, the ENVRI Knowledge Base, and the ENVRI Use Cases.\nDaniele, can you explain in more detail why\nthese three components are crucial to the ENVRI-hub?\nDaniele: These are three distinct but complementary\nelements used as containers to support the provision of\nheterogeneous datasets, services, and software within\nENVRI.\n","tags":["big-data","catalogue","cerif","daniele-bailo","database","data","dcat-ap","envri","envri-fair","epos","eu-projects","europe","fair-principles","ict-web","ingv","interoperability","metadata","research-infrastructure","services","tecnology-ict"],"title":"The three components to ENVRI-hub success"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"For the last few years, let us say about three, people in my field have often talked about the F.A.I.R. principles: loved by European officials, regarded with suspicion by computer engineers, partly approved by scientists. These principles have a significant impact on research areas that in some way deal with data and data sharing.\nQuestion: which area of research has nothing to do with data and their distribution? Answer: almost none. Logical inference: the FAIR principles, whether we say \u0026ldquo;great!\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;alas\u0026rdquo;, concern almost all researchers.\nLet us therefore try to understand them better, and look at some of their characteristics. And let us try to do it simply. Anyone interested in more detailed documents can refer to Wikipedia, the FORCE11 documents, or the European reports.\nWelcome to the world, FAIR principles! When I was a child, I had my first intellectual growth crises, the ones that push you beyond simple concepts toward a deeper understanding of reality, when I encountered the idea of a \u0026ldquo;reference date\u0026rdquo;. We mention them constantly: the foundation of Rome (21 April 753 BC), the birth of Christ (25 December, year 0), the beginning of the First World War (28 July 1914). Yes, we humans need, in order to orient ourselves, to set simple reference points that let us identify a before and an after. In reality, certain processes have been simmering for a long time, and then at some undefined point: puff, they happen.\nThe same logic applies to the FAIR principles. The scent of FAIR had been in the air for some time, especially in the FORCE11 community. Then someone lifted the lid by writing a good article in Nature Scientific Data: \u0026ldquo;The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship\u0026rdquo;. And so, on 15 March 2016, the FAIR principles were officially born.\nNice. But what are they about? One might be tempted to say: \u0026ldquo;life, the universe, and everything\u0026rdquo;. [Off-topic book, but still a good one]. The answer is clearly playful, but it contains a grain of truth: the principles are rather general and, from the perspective of those who implement data-distribution systems, potentially ambiguous. On the other hand, they have the merit of not prescribing technologies and of leaving technical and implementation freedom. The principles tell us that data must be:\nFindable: searchable in their entirety; Accessible: it must be possible to access the data themselves, not only search for them; Interoperable: data interoperability, understood as the possibility for different systems to read and \u0026ldquo;understand\u0026rdquo; the data, must be ensured; Reusable: data must be structured so that they can be reused, including legal elements such as usage licenses. This gives us the acronym F.A.I.R.: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. A minimal set of principles to make research data consistent and reusable.\n\u0026lt;!- -nextpage- -\u0026gt;\nIn practice? Everything starts from the observation that we are overwhelmed by data and we want to use them. But data are a bit like the inhabitants of planet Earth: saying \u0026ldquo;let us feed everyone\u0026rdquo; is beautiful, but if you give chili con carne to my grandmother, boiled cabbage to a Mexican person, and andouillettes to my brother, all three of them, as in the old joke, will throw them back at you.\nHaving a lot of data to use is interesting, but if they are different, hard to find and process, provided in different formats and with different meanings, it is impossible to profit from them scientifically, socially, or economically. We therefore need to bring order to the jungle of data, structures, and sharing methods. Scientists and researchers have obsessions that can change life a little, for example finding recurring patterns in large amounts of data from sensors scattered around the planet. Analyze data to predict what will happen and gain an advantage. This already happens in research, for example in climate science, where analysis of atmospheric data makes it possible to identify frequent patterns and predict and circumscribe, always with a margin of error, climate oscillations or catastrophic events such as El Nino. It is not science fiction, and it is widely used commercially. One of the simplest examples is heat maps: tons of data collected by companies such as Amazon that describe how services are used on websites. The data are processed to create maps of the most-clicked areas of a page, such as Wikipedia heat maps, and then used to understand where it is convenient to place advertising banners. Fine. But if data arrive today in ASCII, tomorrow in binary format, the day after tomorrow in Excel tables, and next week in Word documents, how can we harmonize everything and feed it to software, which typically needs standardized input data? This is where the huge intellectual and economic effort to give scientific data a rationale begins.\nThe key word for data is machine-readable: data must be readable by a machine, which cannot distinguish meaningfully between uppercase and lowercase, and does not know that \u0026ldquo;temperature\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;degree\u0026rdquo; may mean the same thing for researcher Arnolfo and researcher Berenice.\nThese and other deeper, and more serious, considerations have led to\nspecifying data as a Data Object, that is, a triple containing: 1. the data themselves, for example a Word file; 2. the metadata; 3. a unique identifier\nData Object \u0026lt;data, metadata, PID\u0026gt;\nSo, in practical terms, producing FAIR data means making an effort to harmonize data, describe them, and design the systems that make them available, so that we have:\ncommon and standard data formats common and standard metadata formats unique identifiers for data and metadata that allow us to find them again licenses aggregated in the metadata defined semantic schemas that allow us to understand what data and metadata values refer to IT systems for accessing and searching data \u0026hellip;and other aspects we can discuss later Two, just two, technical details Maybe three. If they are not interesting, you can always skip this section. By metadata, here we use the generic definition of \u0026ldquo;data that describe data\u0026rdquo;.\nThey are the information associated, for example, with mp3 files: artist, producer, date and time of file production. Around metadata there is a rather active community trying to identify the most suitable schemas for each field. I am thinking, for example, of DCAT-AP, a specification of terms based on the W3C data catalogue vocabulary (DCAT), whose purpose is to describe public data catalogues in Europe. By following this schema, there is a clear definition of what a file contains. If, at some point, I, a poor non-thinking machine that can only read files line by line and compare words with reference strings already stored in memory, read:\ndct:title then I know that whoever compiled the file, human being or another machine, is referring to the dataset title in the \u0026ldquo;dct\u0026rdquo; standard, and I can therefore make it bold, red, and centered on the page because it is a title. It is a simple and apparently banal example, but this is how things work.\nAnother point: when we talk about standards in this context, we generally refer to systems accepted by communities or standardization bodies, such as ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, or the W3C, the inventors and \u0026ldquo;maintainers\u0026rdquo; of the web. Data in a standard format can therefore be interpreted unambiguously because their structure is known in advance.\nAnother important detail: the FAIR principles are not just philosophies or an acronym; they are detailed in order to specify them more clearly. There are therefore sub-principles for each letter of the acronym. For Findability alone, we have the following, kept in English for simplicity:\nF1. (Meta)data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier F2. Data are described with rich metadata (defined by R1 below) F3. Metadata clearly and explicitly include the identifier of the data they describe F4. (Meta)data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource I almost kept my promise. They are only three. Of course, if there are questions in the comments, we can expand.\nAre the F.A.I.R. principles really \u0026ldquo;fair\u0026rdquo;? First of all, if you have made it this far, congratulations. You have a strong stomach. Or maybe you are simply interested in the topic. Let us therefore go a little deeper into FAIR by using a few questions. The acronym FAIR plays on the multiple meanings of the English word \u0026ldquo;fair\u0026rdquo;, which also means just or equitable, suggesting that these principles are impartial.\nLet us ask ourselves: are the FAIR principles really fair? If we consider them as a minimal set of directives that can be applied to everyone, certainly yes.\nIf they are also applied to everyone impartially, they can create \u0026ldquo;IT ecosystems\u0026rdquo; in which all data producers are on the same level, establishing a sort of informational equity. This is a concept related to the more popular peer to peer.\nThe dream is therefore to have intelligent data-distribution centers scattered across the global network, integrating search and data-access functionality, and self-descriptive because they use standards and metadata. Then a set of agents, human or machine, would use, or in the technical English term \u0026ldquo;consume\u0026rdquo;, these data to do whatever they want: analysis, production of new data by correlating existing data, processing, and so on.\nBut since the devil is in the details, as people like to say these days, we need to consider reality. It is legitimate, for example, to ask: who decides when data are \u0026ldquo;Findable\u0026rdquo;? What technical specifications can determine unambiguously the Findability of data? And again: is Findability a Boolean principle, meaning yes/no? Or are there different degrees of Findability?\nLet us think together about a use case. Suppose the data in question are your photo. A nice .jpeg image of you in the Bahamas diving with a shark, uploaded somewhere.\nOn Facebook, on your personal blog, on the profile of some service you use, or somewhere else. When you search your name on Google, a series of results appears. Perhaps by clicking here and there you will also find your photo. So? Is your photo \u0026ldquo;findable\u0026rdquo;? Answer: Yes! Question: Are you sure? What if you were a machine? Wouldn\u0026rsquo;t you want metadata describing that the content of the photo is really you, and not the shark? Answer: um\u0026hellip; Pressing question: and if you find it, but perhaps you yourself do not have the license to use it because Facebook decides to consider all material uploaded to the social network as its own, can we say that your photo is \u0026ldquo;Accessible\u0026rdquo;? Answer: um\u0026hellip; um\u0026hellip;\nWhich is the correct conclusion. Because when we go into detail, we enter a level of complexity where clear and peremptory answers become difficult unless multiple aspects of the issue are considered. Especially when talking to machines. Here I am tempted to say that James Cameron got it right in Terminator, where machines are stupid and therefore relentless and inhuman. An intelligent agent, a networked software program, analyzing temperature data produced by your boiler connected to the Internet of Things is basically a small terminator: if you do not give it the data in the format it wants, or if you do not describe them in the precise, pedantic way that only machines require, it terminates you. Click. You no longer exist. Your data make no sense. It disconnects. Poor boiler. It keeps working anyway, relentless too, since it was programmed to run until the gas runs out or someone closes the valve.\nData are therefore FAIR also as a function of the precision and detail with which their FAIRness is assessed.\nThe more the definition of FAIR is shared, technically meaningful, and not subject to interpretation, the more the principles will be applicable fairly to everyone.\nWhy have they been successful? At this point, it is legitimate to ask why the principles summarized by the acronym FAIR have been successful. Thinking about it, history could have gone differently. For example, best practices and implementation rules for open data could have been expanded further. Or interoperability, as computer engineers conceive it, and metadata for research could have been better explained and promoted. Other paths were possible, but events instead led us to the F.A.I.R. principles. Why?\nThere are considerations on different levels. From a communication point of view, the FAIR principles work very well. The acronym is easy to remember and has this additional meaning of \u0026ldquo;equitable\u0026rdquo;, suggesting rules that can be applied equally and fairly. From the endorsement point of view, they have had the support of important people and research centers. So it is the usual story: if a farmer from Velletri says it is going to rain, we listen and maybe bring the laundry inside, just to be safe. But if Colonel Bernacca says it, for those who do not know or remember him, see his fantastic weather forecast video after Hurricane David in 1979, then it is law carved in marble. From the funding point of view, the principles have become a fundamental criterion for the European Union, especially for funding H2020 projects in the European Open Science Cloud area, acronym EOSC, which has great ambitions and a certain degree of complexity. And therefore, ca va sans dire, all projects now require that when data are used, produced, or managed, these activities follow FAIR.\nThe current state: FAIR principles and reality The principles are fascinating. But to make the vision tangible, it must be brought down into reality.\nIt is extremely difficult to summarize the reality of European public research data briefly and rigorously. Certainly not in this post. But one very general consideration can be made: data produced by public administration and research in Europe form a large jungle in which people are trying, with effort, to bring order by implementing appropriate policies, thinking about infrastructure sustainability, creating cross-fertilization of skills, funding cluster projects, and so on.\nSo, in practice?\nFrom an engineering and IT point of view, it is not easy to provide directives because Europe is always very inclusive and tries to find a balance that respects everyone\u0026rsquo;s needs.\nBut it is clear that, on several fronts, there are now people willing to get their hands dirty and openly state what needs to be done technologically to implement the FAIR principles.\nEurope has also been active, both by publishing documents such as Turning FAIR into reality, the report of the Commission FAIR Data Expert Group, and by opening funding channels to support initiatives such as GO-FAIR and ENVRI-FAIR. Outside Europe, there are also other initiatives, including FAIRSharing.org.\nThe greatest difficulty is not only defining, clearly but also generically and inclusively, systems that distribute FAIR data. It is also using an approach that can be understood by data managers and research leaders, who often have scientific backgrounds outside computer science.\nThe client-server architecture, which an undergraduate computer science student can explain even in extreme situations, for example if woken up in the middle of the night with a bucket of water while someone shouts \u0026ldquo;give an example of a client-server protocol with handshaking!\u0026rdquo; [cit. Renato Spigler, my Analysis professor at university], is not something that biologists, philosophers, and others can digest easily. It needs to be blended, homogenized, packaged, and sold well. That is why we thought of the FAIR pyramid.\nThe FAIR pyramid and peace of mind Our working group found itself exactly at the intersection of the scientific and technical domains, where principles become reality, having to work on this FAIR mess. Now that we have a few years of experience developing a fully FAIR-compatible architecture in the EPOS project, we decided to create something digestible. A sort of FAIR antacid.\nIt is the FAIR pyramid.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_3668\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignnone\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;3000\u0026rdquo;] From the article: Perspectives on the Implementation of FAIR Principles in Solid Earth Research Infrastructures DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2020.00003[/caption]\nThe pyramid describes a common approach used by scientists and by those who work daily on data and systems, based on four levels:\ndata level, metadata level, access level, (re)use level. Data are usually the main activity and the main asset of scientists and data professionals in research infrastructures. Consequently, the first conceptual step for every scientist is to worry about data: formats, structure, description, and so on (Level 1). Once data are properly managed, the conceptual challenge of describing and identifying them is usually addressed, in order to create the premises for search and contextualization (Level 2). Once data are properly managed, described, and contextualized through metadata, the next problem is how to make them accessible to users (Level 3). There is then a fourth level, which goes somewhat beyond the FAIR principles and deals, for example, with data analysis and processing. This opens interesting scenarios, summarized by the question: how can a processing service ensure that FAIR input data produce output products that are still FAIR?\nHaving established that, in the context of researchers and research infrastructures, the approach is based on these four phases, the exercise we carried out was to reshuffle the order of the FAIR principles and assign them to each of the four levels of the pyramid. In this way, it will be easier for those who need to implement the FAIR principles to understand at which level they need to act when designing or upgrading a system.\nThe End In short, FAIR comes at the right time in an age when we are submerged by data and where, especially in public and research contexts, we need to bring some order in order to realize the vision of an internet of data where information is truly accessible and analyzable at large scale (Big Data).\nImplementing FAIR, however, is truly complicated when it has to be done for real, getting one\u0026rsquo;s hands dirty with code, data, metadata, and system architectures.\nTo make things a little easier, we produced this pyramid, in which the principles are associated with more clearly defined activities.\nNow comes the next step: who will try to apply them and produce truly FAIR data?\nWe leave the question open\u0026hellip; waiting for another post on the topic, whose focus and contents can be influenced by leaving a comment below.\nAcknowledgements Images in this post were provided courtesy of pxhere\nBaby \u0026amp; Computer https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1250101 Gears https://pxhere.com/en/photo/818429 Header img: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1451251 Bahamas Shark img: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/496028 [jetpack_subscription_form subscribe_text=\u0026ldquo;enter your email\u0026rdquo;]\n","date":"2020-11-04","image":"/en/news/principi-e-sati-f-a-i-r-cosa-sono-perche-ne-abbiamo-bisogno/images/1570195415_featured_hu_4767ecf1f3b52e09.jpeg","month":"2020-11","permalink":"/en/news/principi-e-sati-f-a-i-r-cosa-sono-perche-ne-abbiamo-bisogno/","summary":"For the last few years, let us say about three, people in my field have often talked about the F.A.I.R. principles: loved by European officials, regarded with suspicion by computer engineers, partly approved by scientists. These principles have a significant impact on research areas that in some way deal with data and data sharing.\nQuestion: which area of research has nothing to do with data and their distribution? Answer: almost none. Logical inference: the FAIR principles, whether we say “great!” or “alas”, concern almost all researchers.\n","tags":["data-science","fair","fairdata","integration","interoperability"],"title":"F.A.I.R. Principles and Data: What Are They, and Why Do We Need Them?"},{"categories":["job","reflections"],"content":"3 Open Positions Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia EPOS – European Plate Observing system We are looking for three IT technician profiles to contribute to the development of an innovative European research infrastructure aimed at integrating data and services in the domain of solid Earth sciences. Integration takes place through an advanced system, the Integrated Core Services (ICS), which allows users to search, download, and analyze data from scientific communities through a single map-based web platform and interface using geolocated data.\nThe call is funded by the EPOS-MIUR project. The contract duration is one year, with the possibility of renewal. The position will be classified under the professional profile of Collaboratore Tecnico Enti di Ricerca (level VI). The public call was published in the Italian Official Gazette no. 79 of 04.10.2019. The full text is available at:\nhttp://istituto.ingv.it/it/amministrazionetrasparente/disposizioni-generali/atti-generali/atti-amministrativi-generali/decreti-e-delibere/anno-2019-1/decreti-del-direttore-degli-affari-amministrativi-e-del-personale-2/13061-n-475-concorso-pubblico-per-n-3-posti-di-cter-vi-livello-a-tempo-determinato-codice-bando-3cter-rm1-09-2019/file.html\nAnd here:\nhttp://istituto.ingv.it/it/amministrazionetrasparente/bandi-di-concorso/concorsi-pubblici/tempo-determinato-2019.html\nWho we are The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) is a public research institution. INGV\u0026rsquo;s primary objective is to contribute to understanding the dynamics of the Earth system, in its different phenomena and solid and fluid components, and to mitigating associated natural risks. The institute has launched numerous projects, including the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), which has now become an ERIC. EPOS (www.epos-eu.org) is an innovative European research infrastructure whose purpose is to integrate data and services in the domain of solid Earth sciences. These include data and services related to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, geodetic deformation, satellite observations, and more. They are highly heterogeneous in terms of data-provision technologies, formats, and ways of presenting resources. The activities will take place within this project.\nWho are you? You are a software developer with Java skills, good knowledge of relational databases, and/or a junior system administrator interested in cloud computing, the creation of geolocated systems, and more generally the exploration of new technologies applied creatively to problem solving. You are not afraid to engage with the team to help it achieve its objectives.\nWhat do we offer? The opportunity to join a software development team in a research environment, sharing objectives and working methods. The candidate will be integrated into the work activities after training, if needed, and will be able to enrich their professional experience in cloud systems, with possible future opportunities for professional growth commensurate with actual ability, motivation, and professional level.\nRequired professional qualifications The requirements are described in the call and are summarized here. a) high-school diploma; b) experience in the following areas: software development in Java or other object-oriented languages (C++, Python); design and management of relational databases; experience using Linux/Unix systems; ability to participate in collaborative contexts and teamwork; c) general knowledge of: main imperative programming languages, for example PHP and JavaScript; basic knowledge of non-relational databases, for example MongoDB; d) knowledge of English.\nWork location and salary The work location is Rome. The working schedule is 36 hours per week, with flexible hours. The annual gross salary for CTER level VI positions is governed by the current national contract and is approximately 31,000 euros gross per year.\nApplication To apply for the position, follow the instructions in Article 4 of the call available at this link:\nhttp://istituto.ingv.it/it/amministrazionetrasparente/disposizioni-generali/atti-generali/atti-amministrativi-generali/decreti-e-delibere/anno-2019-1/decreti-del-direttore-degli-affari-amministrativi-e-del-personale-2/13061-n-475-concorso-pubblico-per-n-3-posti-di-cter-vi-livello-a-tempo-determinato-codice-bando-3cter-rm1-09-2019/file.html\n","date":"2019-10-06","image":"/en/news/ingv-epos-assume-tecnico-informatico/images/eric-logo_hu_3570ebafa5516d9b.png","month":"2019-10","permalink":"/en/news/ingv-epos-assume-tecnico-informatico/","summary":"3 Open Positions Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia EPOS – European Plate Observing system We are looking for three IT technician profiles to contribute to the development of an innovative European research infrastructure aimed at integrating data and services in the domain of solid Earth sciences. Integration takes place through an advanced system, the Integrated Core Services (ICS), which allows users to search, download, and analyze data from scientific communities through a single map-based web platform and interface using geolocated data.\nThe call is funded by the EPOS-MIUR project. The contract duration is one year, with the possibility of renewal. The position will be classified under the professional profile of Collaboratore Tecnico Enti di Ricerca (level VI). The public call was published in the Italian Official Gazette no. 79 of 04.10.2019. The full text is available at:\nhttp://istituto.ingv.it/it/amministrazionetrasparente/disposizioni-generali/atti-generali/atti-amministrativi-generali/decreti-e-delibere/anno-2019-1/decreti-del-direttore-degli-affari-amministrativi-e-del-personale-2/13061-n-475-concorso-pubblico-per-n-3-posti-di-cter-vi-livello-a-tempo-determinato-codice-bando-3cter-rm1-09-2019/file.html\nAnd here:\nhttp://istituto.ingv.it/it/amministrazionetrasparente/bandi-di-concorso/concorsi-pubblici/tempo-determinato-2019.html\n","tags":["hiring","ingv","job-openings"],"title":"INGV Is Hiring 3 IT Technicians for EPOS"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":" Bailo, Daniele; Paciello, Rossana\nThe presentation outlines the basics of the EPOS Integrated Core Services Central Hub, a system designed to integrate data, data products, software, and services provided by European data providers in the field of solid Earth sciences.\nIt presents the main architecture and discusses the underlying technological choices.\n[slideshare id=154898130\u0026amp;doc=2019-190711094106\u0026amp;w=400\u0026amp;h=300]\n","date":"2019-07-11","image":"/en/news/epos-integrated-core-services-architecture-basics-tutorial/images/Schermata-2019-07-11-alle-12.54.25_hu_ec92425f1ee7272.png","month":"2019-07","permalink":"/en/news/epos-integrated-core-services-architecture-basics-tutorial/","summary":" Bailo, Daniele; Paciello, Rossana\nThe presentation outlines the basics of the EPOS Integrated Core Services Central Hub, a system designed to integrate data, data products, software, and services provided by European data providers in the field of solid Earth sciences.\nIt presents the main architecture and discusses the underlying technological choices.\n[slideshare id=154898130\u0026doc=2019-190711094106\u0026w=400\u0026h=300]\n","tags":[],"title":"EPOS Integrated Core Services Architecture Basics - TUTORIAL"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":" Are you about to graduate, or close to starting an internship, and would you like to gain experience in a dynamic international environment?\nTake a look at the internship and thesis proposal from the European Plate Observing System (EPOS).\nEPOS - European Plate Observing system Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia EPOS (www.epos-eu.org) is an innovative European research infrastructure whose purpose is to integrate data and services in the domain of solid Earth sciences. These include data and services related to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, geodetic deformation, satellite observations, and more. They are highly heterogeneous in terms of data-provision technologies, formats, and ways of presenting resources. Integration is performed through an advanced system, the Integrated Core Services (ICS), which allows users to search, download, and analyze data from specific communities through a single web platform and interface.\nThis collaboration proposal is addressed to interns and thesis students interested in using innovative technologies. It aims to contribute to the further development and optimization of the Integrated Core Services system, and covers the following topics:\nrelational databases (PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases, for example MongoDB; systems based on the microservices paradigm; optimization and tuning of the system and services; creation of Java and Python modules for mapping and converting data and metadata; creation and optimization of graphical interfaces with AngularJS; semantic integration, development, and optimization of DCAT-AP extensions. The activities to be carried out will be agreed with the student based on their topics of interest.\nInformation Dr. Daniele Bailo\nEPOS-ERIC Technical Officer Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) Via di Vigna Murata 605, 00143 Rome - Italy daniele.bailo@ingv.it Phone. +39 06-51860728\nReferences epos-eu.org Bailo, Daniele, and Keith G. Jeffery. \u0026ldquo;EPOS: a novel use of CERIF for data-intensive science.\u0026rdquo; _Procedia Computer Science_33 (2014): 3-10. Jeffery, Keith G., and Daniele Bailo. \u0026ldquo;EPOS: using metadata in geoscience.\u0026rdquo; Research Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research. Springer, Cham, 2014. Trani, Luca, et al. \u0026ldquo;Establishing Core Concepts for Information-Powered Collaborations.\u0026rdquo; _Future Generation Computer Systems_89 (2018): 421-437. Bailo, Daniele, et al. \u0026ldquo;Mapping solid earth Data and Research Infrastructures to CERIF.\u0026rdquo; _Procedia Computer Science_106 (2017): 112-121. ","date":"2019-06-10","image":"/en/news/tesi-e-tirocini-in-contesto-europeo-discipline-informatiche/images/ERIC_banner_2_510-442903980-1559746653811_hu_494082635275e25d.png","month":"2019-06","permalink":"/en/news/tesi-e-tirocini-in-contesto-europeo-discipline-informatiche/","summary":" Are you about to graduate, or close to starting an internship, and would you like to gain experience in a dynamic international environment?\nTake a look at the internship and thesis proposal from the European Plate Observing System (EPOS).\nEPOS - European Plate Observing system Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia EPOS (www.epos-eu.org) is an innovative European research infrastructure whose purpose is to integrate data and services in the domain of solid Earth sciences. These include data and services related to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, geodetic deformation, satellite observations, and more. They are highly heterogeneous in terms of data-provision technologies, formats, and ways of presenting resources. Integration is performed through an advanced system, the Integrated Core Services (ICS), which allows users to search, download, and analyze data from specific communities through a single web platform and interface.\nThis collaboration proposal is addressed to interns and thesis students interested in using innovative technologies. It aims to contribute to the further development and optimization of the Integrated Core Services system, and covers the following topics:\nrelational databases (PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases, for example MongoDB; systems based on the microservices paradigm; optimization and tuning of the system and services; creation of Java and Python modules for mapping and converting data and metadata; creation and optimization of graphical interfaces with AngularJS; semantic integration, development, and optimization of DCAT-AP extensions. The activities to be carried out will be agreed with the student based on their topics of interest.\n","tags":["data-science","database","data","epos","ict-web","computer-engineering","java","roma-tre","sapienza","development","thesis","internship"],"title":"Theses and Internships in a European Context - Computer Science and IT"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"(This article was originally written for VRE4EIC Newsletter. Follow this link to the original source).\nThe European Plate Observing System (EPOS) highlights how its research infrastructure has become more efficient and user friendly by utilizing technology developed in the frame of the EU H2020 VRE4EIC project.\nIn the last decades quite an amount of tools, technologies and software has been developed to support and improve research throughout the entire data lifecycle[1]. This includes software, modeling tools, and even code that can be used and re-used by researchers around the world. However, more and more emphasis has been given to the structural components that enable a Research Infrastructure[2] to be sustainable, robust and, even most importantly, compliant to the FAIR principles[3]. Such principles prescribe\u0026ndash;in order to enable reproducible science\u0026ndash;that data need to be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. It is usually up to research infrastructure designers, developers and managers to find the best architecture and technologies to enable FAIR to become reality in their scientific domain. However, looking transversally at science domains, it is clear that there is a number of challenges common to several communities, as evidenced by the common requirements elicitation and analysis of existing technical assets carried out both in the VRE4EIC and ENVRIplus project[4].\nIn this framework, VRE4EIC is promoting the adoption of common, standard technical solutions in order to facilitate Research Infrastructures in facing shared challenges and thus complying with FAIR principles.\nThis is the case of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), a Distributed Research Infrastructure long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe.\nIn order to enable accessibility (the “A” of FAIR), the EPOS central hub, that provides access to a wealth of different types of data and services from communities, had to implement appropriate Authorization mechanisms. Such mechanisms are usually referred to as “AAAI”, which stands for Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Infrastructure. Instead of creating such an infrastructure “from scratch”, EPOS took advantage of the existing VRE4EIC “AAAI Service”[5] building block. This component provides a “plug-and-play” solution for the authentication of users, and in addition it integrates different authentication mechanisms from various AAI providers (e.g. EDUGAIN, Facebook, Google and others) in one single system. Due to its integrability into service-based architecture, it can be easily plugged into micro-services-oriented architectures[6], such as the one of EPOS.\nFigure 1: Example of integration of VRE4EIC Authentication services (AAAI) into EPOS central hub Graphic User Interface (GUI). The login box is rendered on the EPOS GUI, but actually managed and ran by VRE4EIC Authentication service building block. Such component is part of the VRE4EIC prototype and runs on VRE4EIC servers made available by project partners (in this case CNR ISTI – Pisa).\nThe EPOS User Interface is presented in Figure 1. It enables the discovery and search of datasets in the solid Earth domain, which includes several communities such as Seismology, GPS, satellite data, volcanic observatories and others. An authentication widget is also available for access to specific dataset. The authentication in this case is managed by the VRE4EIC AAAI service component, that is simply “plugged-in” into EPOS main system.\nStarting from this first pilot, EPOS has also benefitted from VRE4EIC studies and developments in other fields. For instance for the workflow management and the metadata system architecture (both projects use the CERIF[7] model).\nThe EPOS use case has several important implications. The first one is that this pilot has demonstrated the suitability of the strategy adopted by VRE4EIC for supporting and enhancing e-Research Infrastructures, in particular with respect to the AAAI service.\nThe second one, related to research infrastructure sustainability, is that it saved efforts in integrating authentication services on EPOS, with all related technical and security issues, not to counting the development efforts that were optimized by adopting an EU-funded solution.\nThird, on the user side, it allows end users to access through existing credentials from Facebook, eduGAIN, and other Identity Providers, to log in easily to EPOS or any other Research Infrastructure enhanced by VRE4EIC Authentication service.\nNow, a future-oriented exercise is due: imagine that many other research infrastructures would use such shared solutions produced by VRE4EIC. How much development and sustainability efforts would they save by integrating in an easy way metadata catalogue services, AAAI services, and other common solutions?\nThe answer is not trivial, also because other players are available on the EU landscape. However, the expertise brought in by a pool of scientist and engineers in VRE4EIC, strongly connected with the communities, and with skills in the integration of several research infrastructures in various domains, is doubtless precious and capable of optimizing the technical dimension and sustainability, as demonstrated by the EPOS pilot.\n[1] For an overview of the Data Lifecycle see https://www.dataone.org/data-life-cycle\n[2] Definition of Research Infrastructure by EU funding body https://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/index.cfm?pg=about\n[3] M. D. Wilkinson et al., “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship,” Sci. Data, vol. 3, p. 160018, 2016.\n[4] “ENVRIplus is a Horizon 2020 project bringing together Environmental and Earth System Research Infrastructures, projects and networks together with technical specialist partners to create a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster of Environmental Research Infrastructures across Europe”. “Theme 2” deliverables report an overview of common elements and requirements in the various Environmental Research Infrastructures http://www.envriplus.eu/deliverables/\n[5] More information about the VRE4IEC AAAI building block can be found here https://www.vre4eic.eu/images/Public_deliverables/D3.3_Building_Blocks.pdf\n[6] A extensive compendium about Microservices architecture and techniques can be found in S. Newman, Building Microservices. O’Reilly Media\u0026hellip;\n[7] CERIF stands for Common European Research Information Format, see https://www.eurocris.org/cerif/main-features-cerif and https://www.eurocris.org/eurocris_archive/cerifsupport.org/cerif-in-brief/index.html\n","date":"2018-10-30","image":"/en/news/enhancing-research-infrastructures-with-vre4eic-components-the-epos-success-story/images/Schermata-2018-10-30-alle-11.40.36_hu_ba7e048238d65dfc.png","month":"2018-10","permalink":"/en/news/enhancing-research-infrastructures-with-vre4eic-components-the-epos-success-story/","summary":"(This article was originally written for VRE4EIC Newsletter. Follow this link to the original source).\nThe European Plate Observing System (EPOS) highlights how its research infrastructure has become more efficient and user friendly by utilizing technology developed in the frame of the EU H2020 VRE4EIC project.\nIn the last decades quite an amount of tools, technologies and software has been developed to support and improve research throughout the entire data lifecycle[1]. This includes software, modeling tools, and even code that can be used and re-used by researchers around the world. However, more and more emphasis has been given to the structural components that enable a Research Infrastructure[2] to be sustainable, robust and, even most importantly, compliant to the FAIR principles[3]. Such principles prescribe–in order to enable reproducible science–that data need to be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. It is usually up to research infrastructure designers, developers and managers to find the best architecture and technologies to enable FAIR to become reality in their scientific domain. However, looking transversally at science domains, it is clear that there is a number of challenges common to several communities, as evidenced by the common requirements elicitation and analysis of existing technical assets carried out both in the VRE4EIC and ENVRIplus project[4].\nIn this framework, VRE4EIC is promoting the adoption of common, standard technical solutions in order to facilitate Research Infrastructures in facing shared challenges and thus complying with FAIR principles.\nThis is the case of the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), a Distributed Research Infrastructure long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe.\n","tags":["aaai","epos","europe","myjob","research-infrastructure","ri","vre4eic"],"title":"Enhancing Research Infrastructures with VRE4EIC components: the EPOS success story"},{"categories":["job","music-video","technology-ict"],"content":"It feels a little strange: I am both proud of and slightly shy about the video we released in the framework of the VRE4EIC project.\nIt was funny: I had just landed at Schiphol airport and rushed to TU Delft University. I suddenly found myself at the New Media Center, in front of a camera, inside a soundproof studio with a bright green background, with a few people watching, or perhaps staring, from behind the soundproof glass. Then I had to start speaking with my southern European English accent. That was the embarrassing part.\nI think I understood how fish feel in a fish bowl.\nThe studio team, however, were excellent and patient, and they explained clearly how everything would work. We then relied on the substantial preparation already done for the video lecture.\nThe topic of the videos is How Research Infrastructures can take advantage of interoperable VRE building blocks.\nIn the first part, I explain what research infrastructures are, what distributed research infrastructures can provide to users, and how they are organized from governance and technical perspectives. Real examples are discussed through the EPOS use case.\nIn the second part, the focus is on how interoperable building blocks developed within VRE4EIC can be used to enhance the functionalities of research infrastructures. The EPOS use case is again discussed and analyzed as an example.\nPART 1 [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVt6UAXXgKU?rel=0\u0026w=350]\nPART 2 [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WJtKqrIV-4\u0026w=350]\nI hope you enjoy the two videos.\n","date":"2018-08-09","image":"/en/news/how-research-infrastructures-can-take-advantage-of-interoperable-vre-building-blocks/images/Screenshot_20180809-1801383_hu_b2d52d6c9d907324.png","month":"2018-08","permalink":"/en/news/how-research-infrastructures-can-take-advantage-of-interoperable-vre-building-blocks/","summary":"It feels a little strange: I am both proud of and slightly shy about the video we released in the framework of the VRE4EIC project.\nIt was funny: I had just landed at Schiphol airport and rushed to TU Delft University. I suddenly found myself at the New Media Center, in front of a camera, inside a soundproof studio with a bright green background, with a few people watching, or perhaps staring, from behind the soundproof glass. Then I had to start speaking with my southern European English accent. That was the embarrassing part.\n","tags":["epos","work","lectures","lectures","research-infrastructure","video","vre4eic"],"title":"How Research Infrastructures can take advantage of interoperable VRE building blocks"},{"categories":["job","reflections","writing"],"content":"I recently returned from Edinburgh, a city that, besides being rainy and picturesque, hosted a conference on Virtual Research Environments, a topic obscure to most people and, above all, impossible to explain to my grandmother when she asks: \u0026ldquo;What do you talk about at these meetings?\u0026rdquo; Now, when I say \u0026ldquo;grandmother\u0026rdquo;, do not make the mistake of imagining a meek, dazed ninety-five-year-old. She is simply the spearhead of a generation that has lived through, and grown stronger through, war, 1968, the economic boom, Canale 5, Mike Bongiorno, soap operas, and Young Signorino. She is sharp, always ready with an answer, impossible to deceive, skilled at outmaneuvering others, and hard to bend to anyone\u0026rsquo;s will. Basically, a bulldozer. These are the people they should make films about. Robocop and Marvel superheroes look like timid newlyweds by comparison.\nAlthough I am proud to descend from such tough ancestors, I must have some inner weakness and host, unknowingly, a form of original sin. The Italian state looks at me with suspicion, as a potential perpetrator of repeated embezzlement against it and against taxpayers\u0026rsquo; pockets. Therefore, with paternal care, it implements every strategy to prevent me from falling into temptation and assuming the sad status of state parasite. Right. Well done.\n[gallery ids=\u0026ldquo;3343,3344\u0026rdquo; type=\u0026ldquo;rectangular\u0026rdquo; link=\u0026ldquo;none\u0026rdquo;]\nI had confirmation of this once again when, after returning from Edinburgh, I carried out the so-called \u0026ldquo;mission closure\u0026rdquo;, meaning the final paperwork needed to receive reimbursement for money advanced from my own pocket. It is the last step in a complex thief-proof procedure involving many passages. Removing the most boring ones and skipping details for insiders, I can summarize the process as follows:\na) Recovering the mission form: this means obtaining the form to fill out in order to receive permission to go on a mission. Be careful, however: there is a different one for each section of the institution, and the form does not correspond to the section you belong to, but to the one managing the funds that finance your mission. It is strange and a little complex. It took me years to understand, but never mind, I have time: I am a public employee. The forms are located in an internal virtual area, the intranet, which luckily can be accessed through an easy-to-remember address such as http://intranet.sede.questoente.it/?q=node/88/index.php. From there, one can conveniently navigate through a hundred links to the forms page of the relevant section, where, among a list of forty different forms randomly ordered and identified by acronyms familiar to everyone, for example \u0026ldquo;Form E/intranet - request for purchase of inventoriable goods\u0026rdquo;, one selects the mission form. Ah, no, I forgot. There are actually three forms: mission in Italy, mission abroad, request for overtime during mission. For each, I can have either the editable Word file or the non-editable PDF. The latter is dedicated to naive people who enjoy printing the sheet and filling it in with a blue pen, usually spilling beyond the available spaces marked by insufficient black lines, with consequent rejection of the file. Amateurs. This also confirms the theory that the invention of PDF was commissioned by SISDE from a satanic sect formed by former INPS employees.\nOf course, all the forms contain the same information, but differ in essential elements that invalidate submission, such as the section logo and the font size of the footnotes. I publicly admit that I tried to be clever and, after the first fifteen missions, tired of spending ten minutes searching for the right form, I saved the file on my computer. Wrong. Forms change from time to time, maybe once every ten years or once a week, and the saved copy I had laboriously filled in had become obsolete. I had to start over. Patience. I have time, because as everyone knows, public employees do practically nothing, and it is therefore right that the little work assigned to them be long, tedious, and traceable through lengthy bureaucratic chains certified by stamped sheets of paper archived in cardboard folders tied with cotton tape and usually buried in the institution\u0026rsquo;s dungeons, in case an audit ever comes. Damn right. At least these public employees do something.\nb) Filling in the mission form. This phase is complicated. The form has several parts to complete with declarations and requests that must be put in black and white, for example \u0026ldquo;prior request pursuant to Ministerial Decree MAE of 23/3/2011, published in Official Gazette no. 132 of 9/6/2011 concerning mission settlement procedures\u0026rdquo;. But I do not complain about this. I remember very well when, at thirteen, I went with my father to the post office and he taught me how to fill in a payment slip. It seemed difficult and inhuman, then I understood how it worked and got used to it. It is a moment I remember fondly, but in fact it was the first dose of bureaucracy to which I later became addicted. A pity: the habit of these administrative torments robbed me of the amazement felt by children, researchers, and psychiatrists in front of the complex perversion of the human mind.\nc) Delivering the mission form. When I began this new career after coming from another research institution, I immediately realized the complexity of the previous steps, but I trusted that once the form had been obtained and filled in, the road would be downhill. I was harshly brought back to reality when I realized that the form required: the signature of the section director, the signature of the fund manager, and prior approval of the expense by the competent offices. As everyone knows, sheets of paper do not have legs. This means that the file, rightly included in the set of sheets of paper, must be accompanied by me to the various offices where I can collect the precious signatures and authorizations. It is not that once I reach the office I can obtain a signature on the spot, of course. Depending on the case, I must speak with a secretary, leave the file and retrieve it the next day, or wait for a while for something behind the door to happen and then still leave the file and collect it the next day. Of course, it is a bit of a waste of time, but this is right and I must not dare complain, because as a public employee I have nothing particular to do, apart from coordinating an international working group for the development of an innovative infrastructure for sharing Earth-science data, which I can evidently do in spare moments while transporting files from one office to another.\nc.1) Special cases: I cannot omit, and I say this clearly and at length, since as a ministry employee I have all the time I want to write in detail things that I could summarize in two lines, or most often in one word or even a syllable such as \u0026ldquo;yes\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;meh\u0026rdquo;, that there are special cases in which public employees also volunteer. This does not include classic activities with disabled or elderly people, categories whose meekness and benevolence are overestimated by those who do not spend time with them, but rather doing good for colleagues and the institution without receiving additional recognition. This happened in my section, where an employee unknown to me, true humility indeed, computerized the mission bureaucracy together with the section director. I am lucky: I save the ten minutes needed to search for the form and the half day spent hunting for signatures. Unfortunately, the computerized procedure can be used only when the funds are hosted by the section to which one belongs, and that is almost never my case. Patience. I will keep doing my rounds. I have time.\nd) The mission, finally. The actual mission is the moment when the state rightly watches most carefully with its paternal gaze. And rightly so. Think how many crimes and sins it has spared me. A dense series of rules attempts to cut off at the root every possibility of defrauding or fattening oneself at the taxpayers\u0026rsquo; expense. One therefore lives the mission anxiously, constantly thinking about keeping every receipt for itemized reimbursement, rather than with the freedom of mind needed to focus on complex topics discussed in international conferences in a language other than one\u0026rsquo;s own, usually English, in conversation with brilliant minds from all over the world. At dinner, one must draw on all communication and linguistic skills to explain to restaurateurs across Europe that each person at a table of ten needs a separate receipt, otherwise the institution\u0026rsquo;s offices might frown and cancel the reimbursement. One must bear, with embarrassment, the gaze of foreign colleagues who receive a generous daily allowance and do not feel castrated by suffocating rules. They look at me with amazement. Some perhaps with pity or solidarity. One must also remember that one can spend at most around sixty euros per day in total for two meals. This if one is a researcher. Technicians can reach only forty euros. It goes without saying that for missions in Denmark or Norway, technicians have three options: 1) eat only breakfast, taking a cappuccino and croissant for thirty euros, and use the remaining ten to buy mints; 2) fast all day and at dinner order a beer, vegetable couscous, cabbage or aubergines imported from Italy, and a dessert, usually indigestible cheesecakes are popular; 3) pack bread, jam, and tins of mackerel for dinner, and use the forty euros for a full breakfast including orange juice.\nBack home, the potential state parasites arrive at the office on Monday morning with envelopes full of receipts, boarding passes, hotel invoices, and bus tickets, ready to demonstrate the expenses incurred and finally close the mission. At first I found this step difficult, perhaps the hardest of the whole chain. This happened because, blinded by greed, I expected to recover all expenses and, even worse, with senses clouded by arrogance, I wanted to understand the meaning of the endless steps and categorizations I was and still am required to perform. Fortunately, I understood the two keys to surviving the process psychologically intact.\nThe first is to forget one\u0026rsquo;s nature as a human being and convince oneself one is an automaton. Once I entered this state of mind, I was surprised to see myself calmly collecting and categorizing receipts, copying amounts spent by hand from one sheet to another, stapling receipts one by one while highlighting dates, searching for and attaching boarding passes, adding up the total of validated bus tickets, and reconstructing with colleagues the food and drinks consumed per person by subtracting them from the single receipt of that evening when, alas, we failed to communicate to the waiter that we wanted eleven separate invoices.\nThe second key was the discovery of a special, precious sheet. It is called the \u0026ldquo;mission report\u0026rdquo; and is the place where I can self-certify, under my own responsibility, everything that the diligent bureaucrat, guided by the wise hand of the legislator, was unable to foresee. I used it, for example, the last time when at 11:00 PM we had to return to the hotel after a dinner based on British fatty matter, I do not remember whether pork shank, fried butter, or something else. In theory we should have taken the bus, because the costly temptation to take a taxi could have swollen our pride and must rightly be avoided at all costs: taxis are only for exceptional cases, says the rule. Even in England, where taxis are ridiculously cheap and, if taken by three or more people, certainly convenient. In reality, we were exhausted after a day of travel and hours of conference, so after a quick hotel check-in we rushed to dinner before everything closed. I spent my last strength booking an Uber taxi on my smartphone, total cost 7.46 pounds. The mission report saved me, where I declared that \u0026ldquo;due to road disruptions in the streets adjacent to the route from the hotel to the restaurant, which caused a limitation of bus services during the day and their complete suspension from 9:00 PM GMT, the undersigned was forced to use a taxi for a total cost of pounds 7.46.\u0026rdquo; I think the offices are becoming suspicious, because in the evening the streets were disrupted also during my missions to Amsterdam, Utrecht, Bergen, and Canicatti. But I am safe, both because I self-certified and because one of the secretaries is from Canicatti and always complains about potholes and poor public transport in that metropolis.\nJust yesterday, in one of the many moments when, as the ministry employee I am, I had nothing to do, apart from answering the 92 emails received that day, writing two abstracts, completing two deliverables, coordinating with the German colleague on the conversion of metadata from nine communities for a total of about ten terabytes of incomprehensible data, holding a couple of teleconferences to manage the creation of web APIs, responding to the online consultation on FAIR principles launched by the European Open Science Cloud, continuing the pending article, and other entirely secondary tasks, I reflected on the loving care the legislator has for my soul, and I was moved. I was shaken deeply. Nothing but paternal and selfless love toward me could push him to spend so much energy preventing even the remotest possibility that I might steal.\nTaking an average between southern and northern European countries, on mission I will spend around 50 euros per day on meals and another 20 on buses or taxis, when my soul turns toward Evil and wastefulness. Including travel expenses to and from the departure and arrival airports, I will roughly reach a daily expense of 80 euros. Let us exaggerate: 85.\nSo, our survival while traveling costs the state 85 euros per day. Actually the state does not pay, Europe does, because these are European funds. But never mind. It rightly watches so that I do not declare excessive expenses, say 100 euros per day, which happens to be the flat-rate allowance my Dutch colleagues receive without having to fill in any form. But no, no. I do not even want to think about it. I am glad there is a reliable authority that takes care to verify the declared expense in detail, rather than risk spending even one extra euro that might end up in the pocket of a state parasite. In this way my conscience is clean, and the dark tree of disobedience to the seventh commandment casts its shadow far from me.\nUnfortunately, as everyone knows, Evil always whispers into the ears of pure souls like mine, souls that do not steal while on mission. Following this sinister line of reasoning, I began wondering how much these immeasurable spiritual fruits cost the state.\nI did some calculations and realized that my net hourly pay is about 11 euros per hour. Degrees, PhDs, and specializations have always guaranteed wealth and luxury, as everyone knows. I then discovered that, by following the full mission procedure, I spend: ten minutes recovering the mission form, twenty filling it in, an hour and a half delivering it and collecting signatures, and two hours closing it. That makes about four hours, equivalent to roughly 44 euros.\nUnfortunately, I am not the only one working on my mission. There are also the secretaries, who in ordinary cases spend an hour checking receipts and verifying that the amount to be committed is available, at a total cost to the state of about 10 euros; the section director, who on average spends a good twenty minutes reading, signing, and resolving frequent disputes, with an estimated total cost of 5 euros; and the fund manager, who must consider whether the mission is justified and thoughtfully add his signature, but he takes only ten minutes: 3 euros. To this calculation I add a special indicator I call the attention span factor, meaning the time burned following the mission. The operations I perform to complete the bureaucratic process, instead of being consecutive and condensed into a single time slot, are scattered here and there throughout the day, forcing me on one hand to interrupt the secondary tasks for which I am responsible, such as contributing to the writing of a six-million-euro project that will fund my salary and that of my precarious colleagues, and on the other to bring my attention back to the important bureaucratic tasks and understand where I was in the process. Conservatively, I can quantify the attention span factor at about an hour and a half per mission. Approximate total cost: 16 euros.\nWhat emotion, what surprise, what feeling of inner warmth, when I realize that the state spends almost 80 euros per mission to defeat the potential parasite living inside me.\nOnly an ear stubbornly listening to the malicious whisper could conjecture that, instead of throwing 80 euros into bureaucracy easily circumvented through self-certifications, inflated restaurant receipts, and blank taxi receipts filled in by oneself, it would be possible to provide a flat daily allowance of 100 euros and be done with it. Moreover, using basic mathematics, one can verify that for missions of four days or less, which are the majority, it would be cheaper for the state to provide a flat 100-euro daily allowance than to continue sustaining the current mad process of documented reimbursement. Not to mention that at least five people would be relieved of monkey work and perhaps would be less frustrated.\nBut I will certainly not fall into the diabolical trap set by these empty and specious reflections. On the contrary, I consider myself lucky, and my days are now always full of effervescent activities: missions keep me busy, and the memory of this paternal, benevolent affection from the authoritarian and anonymous governor makes even those empty moments happy and dense, moments in which I, a public research employee, would otherwise not know what to do.\nNote 1: all the photos, except the one with the bundle of money, show state parasites at work. As you can see, with the money we give them they take free holidays and indulge in immoral amusements.\nNote 2: I would like to express a sadly posthumous thanks to Umberto Eco and his book \u0026ldquo;How to Travel with a Salmon\u0026rdquo;, which inspired this post.\nHeader Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash\n","date":"2018-07-21","image":"/en/news/sgominare-i-parassiti-statali/images/jesse-orrico-94169-unsplash_hu_c6986136f8e79239.jpg","month":"2018-07","permalink":"/en/news/sgominare-i-parassiti-statali/","summary":"I recently returned from Edinburgh, a city that, besides being rainy and picturesque, hosted a conference on Virtual Research Environments, a topic obscure to most people and, above all, impossible to explain to my grandmother when she asks: “What do you talk about at these meetings?” Now, when I say “grandmother”, do not make the mistake of imagining a meek, dazed ninety-five-year-old. She is simply the spearhead of a generation that has lived through, and grown stronger through, war, 1968, the economic boom, Canale 5, Mike Bongiorno, soap operas, and Young Signorino. She is sharp, always ready with an answer, impossible to deceive, skilled at outmaneuvering others, and hard to bend to anyone’s will. Basically, a bulldozer. These are the people they should make films about. Robocop and Marvel superheroes look like timid newlyweds by comparison.\n","tags":["bureaucracy","humour","public-administration","parasites","state","umberto-eco"],"title":"How to Defeat State Parasites"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"I am particularly proud to share this work, coordinated by Luca Trani. I hope it will pave the way for future developments and formal recognition of the EPOS-DCAT-AP extension.\nAbstract Science benefits tremendously from mutual exchanges of information and pooling of effort and resources. The combination of different skills and diverse knowledge is a powerful capacity, source of new intuitions and creative insights. Therefore multidisciplinary approaches can be a great opportunity to explore novel scientific horizons. Collaboration is not only an opportunity, it is essential when tackling today’s global challenges by exploiting our fast growing wealth of data. In this paper we introduce the concept of Information-Powered Collaborations (IPC) — an abstraction that captures those requirements and opportunities. We propose a conceptual framework that partitions the inherent complexity of such dynamic environments and offers concrete tools and methods to thrive in the data revolution era. Such a framework promotes and enables information sharing from multiple heterogeneous sources that are independently managed. We present the results of assessing our approach as an IPC for solid-Earth sciences: the European Plate Observing System (EPOS).\nYou can access the full PDF here\n","date":"2018-07-16","image":"/en/news/new-paper-establishing-core-concepts-for-information-powered-collaborations/images/Schermata-2018-07-16-alle-17.23.38-1_hu_b6fa519270d4fcb.png","month":"2018-07","permalink":"/en/news/new-paper-establishing-core-concepts-for-information-powered-collaborations/","summary":"I am particularly proud to share this work, coordinated by Luca Trani. I hope it will pave the way for future developments and formal recognition of the EPOS-DCAT-AP extension.\n","tags":["dcat-ap","epos","metadata","w3c"],"title":"New Paper: Establishing Core Concepts for Information-Powered Collaborations"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"An active debate is underway, mainly among some of the major players in the field of Virtual Research Environments, including VRE4EIC and other European project teams. The discussion focuses on defining the commonalities and differences among Virtual Research Environments (VREs), Science Gateways (SGs) as used in North America, and Virtual Laboratories (VLs) as used in Australia_._\nThere is broad agreement on the definition of a VRE: it usually provides not only access to ICT services, data, software components, and equipment, but also a collaborative working environment for cooperation; it supports the research lifecycle from idea to publication, as well as research management and administration.\nHowever, positions differ with respect to SGs and VLs, which are sometimes treated as synonyms and sometimes as distinct concepts: SGs are mainly portals for accessing data, while VLs provide collections of datasets, software, and computing resources that researchers can use to construct their own working environment.\n[Originally published at https://www.epos-ip.org/top-tips-virtual-research-environments-science-gateways-and-virtual-laboratories]\nHEADER IMAGE Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash\n","date":"2017-06-29","image":"/en/news/virtual-research-environment-science-gateways-virtual-laboratories-whats-the-difference/images/luca-bravo-217276_hu_1726aa386f851634.jpg","month":"2017-06","permalink":"/en/news/virtual-research-environment-science-gateways-virtual-laboratories-whats-the-difference/","summary":"An active debate is underway, mainly among some of the major players in the field of Virtual Research Environments, including VRE4EIC and other European project teams. The discussion focuses on defining the commonalities and differences among Virtual Research Environments (VREs), Science Gateways (SGs) as used in North America, and Virtual Laboratories (VLs) as used in Australia_._\nThere is broad agreement on the definition of a VRE: it usually provides not only access to ICT services, data, software components, and equipment, but also a collaborative working environment for cooperation; it supports the research lifecycle from idea to publication, as well as research management and administration.\n","tags":[],"title":"Virtual Research Environment, Science Gateways, Virtual Laboratories. What's the difference?"},{"categories":["job","ordinariabellezza","vita-viaggi"],"content":" This post is simply an homage to my new Spanish friends. The story is straightforward.\nAs often happens, I found myself in Brussels for work. This time it was only for one day, so I arrived the evening before the meeting and wandered around the city on my own. I went for a beer at the wonderful Delirium Café, where I met three Spanish people. It was very easy to start talking with them. We Italians and Spaniards do not usually have much trouble connecting with other people and starting a conversation. On the contrary, the problem is often making us stop talking, but that is another story.\nTo make a long story short, the three Spaniards were part of a larger group, mostly from Madrid and Extremadura (Merida). They were a group of friends who, once a year during Carnival, take a few days off and visit a European city together. Wonderful, simply wonderful. I could also practice my Spanish, which apparently is not dead, although the real mystery remains: where on earth did I learn Spanish? I cannot remember, but it does not matter. In the end we had dinner together, and they were so kind that they even paid for it. Great.\nMy friends, you definitely deserve special hospitality in Rome. Please come soon.\nPS: Special greetings to Manolo and Manola!!\nUPDATE PPS: as noted by Nice, maybe I learned Spanish in Escobar del Campos (joder!).\n","date":"2016-02-08","image":"/en/news/italia-espana-connection/images/IMG_20160208_222841_hu_d04d62d81db3b9e1.jpg","month":"2016-02","permalink":"/en/news/italia-espana-connection/","summary":" This post is simply an homage to my new Spanish friends. The story is straightforward.\nAs often happens, I found myself in Brussels for work. This time it was only for one day, so I arrived the evening before the meeting and wandered around the city on my own. I went for a beer at the wonderful Delirium Café, where I met three Spanish people. It was very easy to start talking with them. We Italians and Spaniards do not usually have much trouble connecting with other people and starting a conversation. On the contrary, the problem is often making us stop talking, but that is another story.\n","tags":["espana","friendship","italia","italy","job","life","ordinariabellezza","spain","travel","life"],"title":"Italia - España  connection"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"After looking in a previous post at some of the technological reasons behind the success of social networks, let us now consider what the new wealth of this social era is, and what opportunities and risks it creates for science.\n4 The new wealth: data and the stream\nIn the scenario described so far, the new wealth consists partly of data and their ownership, and partly of the possibility of sharing them and keeping this continuous flow, the so-called stream, constantly updated. Data ownership can be fairly easily connected to economic wealth: statistical and IT tools for exploring data (data mining) make it possible to extract valuable information that can be used strategically in economic contexts. This action is also promoted at intercontinental level, in the United States and Europe, through initiatives that spread open data policies, meaning policies that encourage opening data to everyone. See the two Italian examples at national and regional level. The data flow, or stream, is equally valuable because it attracts a large number of users: this is what happens on Facebook when users check their wall for friends\u0026rsquo; updates. This guarantees a constant user presence, to whom advertising messages can be delivered and who can also be directed toward content of interest, such as advertising or online shopping sites. In this context, we will focus on the aspects most closely related to science.\n4.1 Collaborative opportunities for science\nToday, the romantic idea of the scientist who, alone in the laboratory, discovers and governs the laws of matter and the cosmos is not only obsolete, but inadequate for facing the challenges that science itself poses.\nScience needs teams of scientists working collaboratively to achieve goals. This is required both by the increasing amount of data to analyze, impossible for a single human being without the support of a coordinated research group and appropriate technologies, and by the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research, which may address the same topic from many different points of view. Think, for example, of DNA, which involves biology, chemistry, theory, mathematics, computation, and more.\nThese considerations are especially true for those scientific fields, different from laboratory or theoretical studies, that carry out monitoring and are therefore intrinsically linked to social, collaborative, and data-sharing aspects, as in the case of seismology and seismic networks.\nMoreover, given how scientific research is now practiced, often through national or European research projects, the usefulness and even the necessity of social and collaborative tools with the characteristics described above is almost obvious. Such tools promote dialogue and information exchange among people working on the same project.\n4.2 Communication risks\nSocial media, however, still present challenges, especially with regard to communication risks, which can be briefly listed:\nPrivacy. The privacy of information, especially sensitive or scientific data, is fundamental and is not always adequately protected. A typical example today is all the websites where it is possible to \u0026ldquo;log in through Facebook\u0026rdquo;. Anyone who agrees to this gives the accessed site free access to their data, and the information about this loss of privacy is not always adequately explained. Cryptographic protection: along with the improvement of encryption algorithms, there is also an increase in the resources available to crack protected data. This is a constantly evolving challenge. In a few years, it will probably be possible to discover even long passwords, and the only way to ensure secure access will be to provide more personal data, thereby not adequately protecting one\u0026rsquo;s privacy. Misunderstanding among people: although SN technologies and, more generally, collaborative technologies promote and simplify communication, cultural, personal, and historical aspects can still complicate the communication process and must not be underestimated. This is evident in large European scientific projects and even more so in pan-European collaborations. From this perspective, collaboration through personal meetings, conferences, and in-person discussions remains the most effective way to think together productively and creatively. The problem of \u0026ldquo;SPAM\u0026rdquo;: another major problem to contain is meaningless data, the so-called spam, an IT term used especially for unwanted email. For this reason, metadata associated with data, one of the fundamental elements of the semantic web, are now more important than ever, because they make it possible to give meaning to data and therefore allow a machine to select data of interest from \u0026ldquo;junk\u0026rdquo; data simply and quickly. Conclusions\nIn conclusion, science in the age of social media can greatly benefit from all the collaborative aspects made available by social networks.\nScience will be able to fully express the potential for progress it has always carried if it can free itself from fears linked to the risks of social networks and make the most of their collaborative and social aggregation potential.\n**************\nWell, this brief excursus on science and social media is over. As usual, any kind of feedback is welcome in the comments below.\nSee you soon.\nHEADER IMAGE Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash\n","date":"2015-12-19","image":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-iv-the-end/images/jesse-orrico-60373_hu_85dc35d197dc832f.jpg","month":"2015-12","permalink":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-iv-the-end/","summary":"After looking in a previous post at some of the technological reasons behind the success of social networks, let us now consider what the new wealth of this social era is, and what opportunities and risks it creates for science.\n4 The new wealth: data and the stream\nIn the scenario described so far, the new wealth consists partly of data and their ownership, and partly of the possibility of sharing them and keeping this continuous flow, the so-called stream, constantly updated. Data ownership can be fairly easily connected to economic wealth: statistical and IT tools for exploring data (data mining) make it possible to extract valuable information that can be used strategically in economic contexts. This action is also promoted at intercontinental level, in the United States and Europe, through initiatives that spread open data policies, meaning policies that encourage opening data to everyone. See the two Italian examples at national and regional level. The data flow, or stream, is equally valuable because it attracts a large number of users: this is what happens on Facebook when users check their wall for friends’ updates. This guarantees a constant user presence, to whom advertising messages can be delivered and who can also be directed toward content of interest, such as advertising or online shopping sites. In this context, we will focus on the aspects most closely related to science.\n","tags":["big-data","facebook","google-plus","science","social-media","social-sciences","technology","technology-ict"],"title":"Science and Social Media - Part IV (the end)"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"After seeing in a previous post what social networks are and some of the social reasons behind their success, let us now look at some of the technological reasons for their enormous spread.\n3 Technological reasons behind the success of social networks\nThe needs described above could find at least partial satisfaction also, and above all, thanks to a technological evolution unprecedented in human history, which made the spread of SNs possible through:\nAppealing and easy-to-use graphical interfaces. This is an extremely broad topic, so I will limit myself to a few points, such as the explosion of Web 2.0. In short, it is a set of interfaces and mechanisms that make the browsing experience highly interactive and personalized. This is made possible through intensive use of technologies and standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Beyond aesthetically pleasing elements, they also integrate features such as georeferencing in order to deliver content that is more suitable for the user, assembling it with external and third-party content that may be of interest. These new technologies include asynchronous protocols that reduce the user\u0026rsquo;s perceived waiting time by loading one web element at a time, instead of forcing the user to wait for the complete loading of all content before seeing anything. They also create the distinctive feeling of \u0026ldquo;taking part in an experience\u0026rdquo; rather than simply \u0026ldquo;consulting content\u0026rdquo;. Graphical interfaces, which now massively include animations, transitions, and dynamic changes in content appearance, for example through the new CSS3 specifications, further strengthen this experiential dimension. Support for large amounts of data. To schematize it with a pseudo-equation, we could write many users = many data. The paradigm according to which data had to be centralized on a single machine is proving insufficient for SN applications, which have expanded enormously thanks also to distributed databases that support high transaction throughput and replication, even at the expense of real-time consistency, which has not proved essential for many SN applications. These databases are often based on non-relational, or NoSQL, paradigms, such as CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others3. Increased bandwidth. Another element that promoted the spread of SNs is the increase in communication bandwidth, which enables the transfer of ever larger amounts of data and a high number of transactions per second. In concrete, everyday terms, this allows users to stay continuously connected and to share their lives on SNs through photos, messages, location updates, and so on. In a few days, we will analyze what the new wealth of the social world is and what opportunities it offers to science. Stay tuned.\nFor any questions, leave a comment below.\nQUOTES\n3 For consistency and non-relational databases, see \u0026ldquo;CAP theorem\u0026rdquo; on Wikipedia or in CouchDB: The Definitive Guide.\nHEADER IMAGE Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash\n","date":"2015-12-17","image":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-iii/images/samuel-zeller-158996_hu_5ba8229b14064e30.jpg","month":"2015-12","permalink":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-iii/","summary":"After seeing in a previous post what social networks are and some of the social reasons behind their success, let us now look at some of the technological reasons for their enormous spread.\n3 Technological reasons behind the success of social networks\nThe needs described above could find at least partial satisfaction also, and above all, thanks to a technological evolution unprecedented in human history, which made the spread of SNs possible through:\n","tags":["big-data","facebook","google-plus","science","social-media","social-sciences","technology","technology-ict"],"title":"Science and Social Media - Part III"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"After introducing the topic in a previous post, let us move to the core of the issue: what social networks are and the social reasons behind their success.\nWhat is a social network? A social network (SN from now on), or social network platform, is an IT platform generally accessible through the World Wide Web (www) that allows users and groups of users to interact by sharing information and data. These networks are usually thematic, for example dedicated to music, science, friendship, and so on, although the most widespread ones today, such as Facebook, tend to integrate different users and interests.\nIn an SN, users can share personal information about their past life, interests, and current activities, generally in real time. An SN also allows multimedia content, such as photos and videos, to be shared.\nSome SNs also allow users to collaboratively share office-type files, such as documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, through affiliated services. See, for example, Google Drive, which is easily accessible with a Google account that also gives access to the Google Plus social network.\nSocial reasons behind the success of social networks Without claiming to be a sociologist, I can highlight a subset of the purely human dynamics that contribute to the unstoppable spread of SNs:\nthe human need for sociality, for which SNs offer a substitute for real relationships that nevertheless seems to engage and satisfy many people the possibility of communicating and exchanging information and data immediately and easily (see the next post) the possibility of being visible and becoming known to the world the extreme \u0026ldquo;democratic\u0026rdquo; nature of SNs, where the visibility of an individual user is not decided by higher bodies but democratically built by the \u0026ldquo;electronic herd\u0026rdquo;[1] the need for knowledge, one of the psychological needs of human beings, which can appear in many forms: the need for scientific knowledge, the need for news, curiosity for learning**[2]** finally, I add a socioeconomic aspect: access by many users to a single portal can generate wealth and profit, and is therefore promoted, facilitated, and encouraged by the advertising industry and other economic actors, as we will see more clearly in the next post In a few days, we will analyze some of the technological reasons behind their success. Stay tuned.\nFor any questions, leave a comment below.\nQUOTES\n[1] For the definition of \u0026ldquo;electronic herd\u0026rdquo;, see T. L. Friedman\u0026rsquo;s interesting essay The Lexus and the Olive Tree.\n[2] On the psychological needs of human beings, see Maslow\u0026rsquo;s theories or more recent texts such as Amori difficili by T. Cantelmi and R. Barchiesi.\nHEADER IMAGE Photo by Sabri Tuzcu on Unsplash\n","date":"2015-12-15","image":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-ii/images/sabri-tuzcu-182689_hu_156b0e92fbf16fce.jpg","month":"2015-12","permalink":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-ii/","summary":"After introducing the topic in a previous post, let us move to the core of the issue: what social networks are and the social reasons behind their success.\nWhat is a social network? A social network (SN from now on), or social network platform, is an IT platform generally accessible through the World Wide Web (www) that allows users and groups of users to interact by sharing information and data. These networks are usually thematic, for example dedicated to music, science, friendship, and so on, although the most widespread ones today, such as Facebook, tend to integrate different users and interests.\n","tags":["big-data","facebook","google-plus","science","social-media","social-sciences","technology","technology-ict"],"title":"Science and Social Media - Part II"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"Just over ten years have passed since a Harvard University student laid the foundations for what, today, is the network almost automatically associated with the expression \u0026ldquo;social network\u0026rdquo;: Facebook.\nM. Zuckerberg, the now former student and new millionaire, managed to become the spokesperson and interpreter of the social dimension of the web. In a relatively short time, especially when compared with the hundreds of thousands of years humanity needed to introduce technologies such as ironworking, this helped drive an enormous and widespread adoption of computers and, more specifically, of the web.\nFacebook, however, can be considered only one use case of the broader concept of social media, which has taken many different forms depending on users\u0026rsquo; areas of interest. These range from integrated networks similar to Facebook, such as Google Plus, to networks of expert users who collaborate to build knowledge, such as Wikipedia and its many wiki derivatives, or to answer questions from less experienced users, such as the Stack Exchange community. There are also networks dedicated to short messages, such as Twitter, and networks more specifically oriented toward science.\nAmong the latter, we can mention:\n- Mendeley.com, a community that allows users to share and catalogue their scientific publications, including through free downloadable cataloguing software\n- ResearchGate and Academia, two social networks that, similarly to Facebook, allow users to share updates and add personal information, especially about their scientific career and CV.\nI will discuss the collaborative opportunities offered by social media, exploring the following points in upcoming posts:\nwhat a social network is\nthe social reasons behind the success of social networks (from now on, SNs)\nthe technological reasons behind their success\nthe new wealth introduced by social networks: data and streams\nIn a few days, we will start with the first two sections: what social networks are and the social reasons for their success. Stay tuned.\nFor any questions, leave a comment below.\nHEADER IMAGE Photo by NASA on Unsplash\n","date":"2015-12-13","image":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-i/images/nasa-43563_hu_7acb3927c00e6ca7.jpg","month":"2015-12","permalink":"/en/news/scienza-e-social-media-part-i/","summary":"Just over ten years have passed since a Harvard University student laid the foundations for what, today, is the network almost automatically associated with the expression “social network”: Facebook.\nM. Zuckerberg, the now former student and new millionaire, managed to become the spokesperson and interpreter of the social dimension of the web. In a relatively short time, especially when compared with the hundreds of thousands of years humanity needed to introduce technologies such as ironworking, this helped drive an enormous and widespread adoption of computers and, more specifically, of the web.\n","tags":["big-data","facebook","google-plus","science","social-media","social-sciences","tecnology","tecnology-ict"],"title":"Science and Social Media - Part I"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"In a previous post we introduced the importance of communication in the context of European-funded projects, and we defined three modules for establishing efficient communication:\nA) Internal Communication Tools B) Communication Activities C) Website After describing the tools for internal communication, we now address communication activities and the website.\nWhy do we need Communication activities? They are the core of internal communication among project members and external communication with stakeholders. They define how the various actors in a project, including project members, scientists, external stakeholders, funding agencies, and citizens, communicate. They are usually described in the Communication Plan.\nAn effective approach for defining communication activities in the Communication Plan is the following:\nDefine general objectives For each objective, define a clear, pragmatic, and concrete sub-objective For each sub-objective, describe Who the actors involved are What means of communication are used Define Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to evaluate the effectiveness of the action Here is an example: assume that your project includes the participation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We could then use the following schema:\nObjective: involvement of SMEs; Sub-Objective1: participation of SMEs in project events; Actors: Project Management Office (PMO), SME representatives Action1: PMO invites SMEs to project events by email KPI for Action1: number of invites / number of participants ratio Action2: ask SMEs to contribute talks or presentations to the event or conference KPI for Action2: number of talks by SME representatives Sub-Objective2: keep SMEs updated about project news; Action1: send a monthly newsletter to SMEs by email KPI for Action1: number of links clicked from the email Action2: \u0026hellip;. KPI for Action2: \u0026hellip;. Sub-Objective3: produce documentation about common work; Action1: \u0026hellip; KPI for Action1: \u0026hellip; Well\u0026hellip; got the idea?\nOf course, a list of communication tools should also be provided. It may include:\nNewsletters Social network activities Videos Interviews \u0026hellip; It is not simple to list them exhaustively. Their need and usefulness depend heavily on the type of project and its goals. This is also an activity that requires communication expertise. In this respect, the best suggestion is to work with a serious communication company experienced in EU projects.\nThe website: a must The purpose of the website is usually to disseminate relevant project information to all stakeholders. The website should not contain restricted material, but only publicly accessible material, such as documents and presentations for external or internal stakeholders, and images for press review.\nAnd social media? The website should also include news and interactions from social networks. However, it should remain simple enough to allow almost anyone with basic IT skills to add pages, articles, and images.\nWhich technology?\nA simple CMS (Content Management System) based on standard LAMP technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is the most reasonable solution. Many popular solutions exist, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. To be Web 2.0 compliant, the layout template could be based on a CSS3 framework such as Bootstrap, Foundation, or Sass, since these infrastructures provide cross-browser compatibility on desktop and mobile devices.\nUsers \u0026amp; editors\nWe plan to have up to five content editors, that is, CMS users. Their access credentials will give them editing capabilities on various subsections of the website; they must be able to:\ncreate new pages and update existing content pages. rename existing pages or move them around the site hierarchy; site navigation should update automatically set publish/unpublish dates for documents upload sets of images and add a public viewing gallery to any page edit content boxes appearing in splash / summary pages, or in side columns Editors will need to be fully trained on all tools available in the CMS, probably through an initial dedicated hands-on seminar, for example three or four two-hour sessions.\n..and some extras\u0026hellip;.\nWebsite management will also require prompt CMS software updates, performance and security monitoring, full management of the SQL database, possible additional database tables and CMS tools, such as PHP snippets based on the CMS API, and traffic statistics monitoring through tools such as Google Analytics.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s all folks Now we reach the conclusion. I will tell you a secret: the contents of these two posts were actually extracted from work I did to select a company to support communication activities in our project. And it seems to work.\nOf course, these are just ideas that still need a lot of refinement.\nHowever, having seen that communication activities in EU projects are unfortunately sometimes disconnected from the wealth of knowledge about communication, which is widely used for commercial purposes, these two posts aim to be a starter guide for approaching communication in EU projects.\nComments and feedback are more than welcome. And please share your experience.\nEU projects aim at competition, it is true, but sharing information about these hidden challenges will help everyone design and run better projects for better science.\nHEADER IMAGE Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash\n","date":"2015-09-21","image":"/en/news/communication-and-dissemination-for-european-projects-2/images/pavan-trikutam-1660_hu_c3793f6839a4407f.jpg","month":"2015-09","permalink":"/en/news/communication-and-dissemination-for-european-projects-2/","summary":"In a previous post we introduced the importance of communication in the context of European-funded projects, and we defined three modules for establishing efficient communication:\nA) Internal Communication Tools B) Communication Activities C) Website After describing the tools for internal communication, we now address communication activities and the website.\nWhy do we need Communication activities? They are the core of internal communication among project members and external communication with stakeholders. They define how the various actors in a project, including project members, scientists, external stakeholders, funding agencies, and citizens, communicate. They are usually described in the Communication Plan.\n","tags":["communication","eu-projects","europe","projects","working-package","wp2"],"title":"Communication and Dissemination for European Projects (#2)"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"Communication is often considered a structural pillar in several domains. The commercial domain, of course, makes extensive use of every kind of communication tool, from social networks to storytelling techniques and traditional advertising, to engage users and ultimately increase profit. However, the importance of communication has also been recognized in science, and in particular in science projects funded by the European Community.\nDocuments like Communicating EU research and innovation: guidance for project participants demonstrate how serious this issue has been taken by the EU.\nIn addition, almost all EU projects I\u0026rsquo;ve come across, include a Communication Working Package.\nThis issue - or better this challenge - needs at least two ingredients to be properly tackled:\na good Communication Plan the know how and technical tools which are, in the end, the substance of the communication itself. They include all the technical tools (e.g. teleconferencing tools) and best practices which must be used to carry on an effective communication based on the communication plan. In this post I\u0026rsquo;ll deal with the second aspect, reporting the experience we had in the context of the EPOS european project and providing some thoughts, guidelines and - most importantly - our experience about the creation of all the tools we needed to set up an efficient communication.\nWe called it Communication \u0026amp; Management Toolkit. HEADER IMAGE by Sceptre (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons\nWhat is a Communication and Management Toolkit? We consider a communication toolkit as the bundle of technical tools and approaches to properly deal with the Communication - and sometimes Management - of a European project.\nCommunication is intended both as internal communication (among project\u0026rsquo;s members and stakeholders) and project\u0026rsquo;s communication with external stakeholders, also known as dissemination and outreach.\nWe defined three different modules to establish an efficient communication:\nA) Internal Communication Tools B) Communication Activities C) Website Although the website is somehow included in the communication activities, it deserves a special place, especially when such services are required to private companies needing details and clear view about the IT tools to be set up (BTW it will simplify also the drafting of the quotation).\nIn the following sections, we will describe the three modules.\nA. Internal communication tools For internal communication, what is basically needed is a collaborative area, a so called “intranet”, where:\nAll relevant information for project\u0026rsquo;s members only are shared (e.g. important dates, internal documents, internal discussions) Communication to and from specific groups of the project internal members is simple and straightforward Usage is simple enough so that also non skilled users can take advantage of it Some commercial tools exist already. Some examples are active.collab, Asana, Basecamp and many other. When I was using and testing them, the main feeling was that they were shaped on the commercial domain and could work well for a company. However when working with scientists, who (rightly) do their work without dealing with (and without caring about) all the complex tasks / activities / deliverables and whatsoever mess of organizational things, those tools hardly work. Users (scientists) simply go on using mailing list and sending around word documents. Some update has been done with the advent of Google Docs (Google Drive), but the bulk of the users do not want to loose too much time with complex IT tools.\n..and so..?\nSo one of the best approach seemed - so far - to create an ad-hoc integrated environment with all the tools that scientists are used to (and that already use as single \u0026lsquo;apps\u0026rsquo;: for example skype, mailing lists, shared google docs repositories etc.) with a single sign-on which give access to the bundle of tools in a simple way.\nHere comes a selection of the minimal set of tools to integrate in order to carry on an effective communication:\nMailing lists \u0026amp; Forums: they are intended to facilitate the communication to and from groups of project members (e.g. within a Working Package, among WP leaders, etc.). Forums and mailing list can be interlinked so that any message in the mailing list is redirected to the forum and vice-versa. IN this way also later-added users can have track of all the messages (with attachments) so far. Files and images repository: a common area for uploading/downloading files and exchange them with members and stakeholders. It is also a fundamental tool to store and categorize images and other dissemination material. This tool should support permissions (some pages should be available to the general public without writing rights). According to the community needs (number of envisioned files, average size of each file etc), this tool may require a good amount of starage space (e.g. 3 Terabytes). Examples: Owncloud, Pydio are the 2 interesting candidates to manage this. Shared calendars: to keep track and disseminate relevant events for project members. Possibly linked to Google calendars which are often in use in many projects. Wiki: this can be used as a place where information are organized and simple to discover. This tool should support permissions (some pages should be available to the general public without writing rights). Example: Mediawiki software is the de-facto standard in this realm. Events organization: this is a tool to organize meetings, events and conferences. It should handle all the aspect of a conference/meeting: program, user registration, deadlines, document submission, dissemination of relevant material etc. Example: Tools like Indico (done by the guys from CERN http://indico.github.io/ ) seems to do the job greatly. Teleconferencing tools: For this purposes some good quality tools (Screen sharing, multi-user, document exchange, private chat etc.) are available, for instance Adobe connect or Webex. Needed features are Screen sharing, 10+ active participants, public, unrestricted viewing stream easily embeddable in HTML pages, document exchange, private chat, auto-recording of conference. Given the above feature set, Webinars can also be managed. After some year of experience, good choices seems to be: 1) Adobe Connect: works well but little bit expensive (2 hosts, up to 25 participants: c.ca 1000€ per year), 2) Web Ex: works well but somebody reported some issues (25 participants, 500 € per year), 3) Google Hangout: works well but somebody finds it a little tricky (15 participants, ridiculous price – c.ca 100€ per year). As said, this is just a minimal set of tools to enable internal communication. Your project may require special additional tools. For instance, if your keyword is organization, then some tool to keep track of the deadlines, tasks, activities etc. could be very useful (the latest - Luca thanks! - I stumbled upon is wrike.com). Or, if you focus on training and interactive teaching experiences for internal members, tools like Moodle could do the job.\nIn the next post we will explore the other two components of the Communication \u0026amp; Management toolkit: Communication Activities and Website.\n","date":"2015-09-10","image":"/en/news/communication-and-dissemination-for-european-projects-1/images/Europe_flags_hu_fa303aabda66dea9.png","month":"2015-09","permalink":"/en/news/communication-and-dissemination-for-european-projects-1/","summary":"Communication is often considered a structural pillar in several domains. The commercial domain, of course, makes extensive use of every kind of communication tool, from social networks to storytelling techniques and traditional advertising, to engage users and ultimately increase profit. However, the importance of communication has also been recognized in science, and in particular in science projects funded by the European Community.\nDocuments like Communicating EU research and innovation: guidance for project participants demonstrate how serious this issue has been taken by the EU.\nIn addition, almost all EU projects I’ve come across, include a Communication Working Package.\nThis issue - or better this challenge - needs at least two ingredients to be properly tackled:\na good Communication Plan the know how and technical tools which are, in the end, the substance of the communication itself. They include all the technical tools (e.g. teleconferencing tools) and best practices which must be used to carry on an effective communication based on the communication plan. In this post I’ll deal with the second aspect, reporting the experience we had in the context of the EPOS european project and providing some thoughts, guidelines and - most importantly - our experience about the creation of all the tools we needed to set up an efficient communication.\nWe called it Communication \u0026 Management Toolkit. HEADER IMAGE by Sceptre (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons\n","tags":["communication","dissemination","eu","europe","projects","working-package"],"title":"Communication and Dissemination for European Projects (#1)"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"The second episode on metadata and brokering. Topics covered: 1. additional definitions, including ontology, relational databases, and related concepts; 2. the broader picture: what the data fabric is, data-fabric elements from the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and possible concrete implementations of RDA guidelines.\n","date":"2015-06-23","image":"/en/news/metadata-and-borkering-a-modern-approach-2/images/Schermata-2015-06-12-alle-23.52.25_hu_d0501f45d0fd202d.png","month":"2015-06","permalink":"/en/news/metadata-and-borkering-a-modern-approach-2/","summary":"The second episode on metadata and brokering. Topics covered: 1. additional definitions, including ontology, relational databases, and related concepts; 2. the broader picture: what the data fabric is, data-fabric elements from the Research Data Alliance (RDA), and possible concrete implementations of RDA guidelines.\n","tags":[],"title":"Metadata and Borkering - a modern approach #2"},{"categories":["job","ordinary-beauty","life-travel"],"content":"\u0026hellip;but so do the men, children, elderly people\u0026hellip; in short, everyone, including us: me and Lucignolo, my trusted guide on trips abroad.\nSo the question is: why all this special attention to the calf muscle? Is it a Portuguese trait? Maybe. Is it simply my obsession? Yes, it is, but that is another matter. Is it this year\u0026rsquo;s fashion? I do not think so.\nThe answer is that this attention to that part of the body is rooted in an initially painful experience: imagine arriving in the morning from the airport by public transport, armed with a trolley suitcase, yes, the good old days of the Interrail backpack are over, and discovering that the road from the tram to the accommodation rises in an almost vertical direction. At first it looks like a sloping street full of cobblestones. Then you realize that the cobblestones, sworn enemies of the trolley suitcase, which must be carried on the shoulder if you do not want to destroy the wheels, gradually give way to an endless series of steps.\nSteps. Stairs. Handrails. Marble curbs. And more steps. Little stairways. Rises. Curves. Cobblestones. Recesses. Protrusions. Flights of stairs. Staircases.\nThe road home winds through those narrow and characteristic alleys lined with tiled houses, doors opening onto unstable buildings, and small squares where locals are hanging around. And while breathlessness turns me blue, I try to admire this bundle of beauty.\nWhen I reach the threshold of the accommodation, I drop the suitcase heavily on the cobblestone ground and lean against the doorframe to catch my breath, waiting for the blood to flow back toward my legs and irrigate my calves. At that point my colleague informs me that we are on the third floor. Without an elevator, of course.\nResigned to my fate, ready to have a pacemaker installed once back in Rome, I start the final stretch of my ascent, swearing that I will not move again for another 48 hours.\nAnd indeed, less than an hour later, just enough time for a shower, we were outside again, relentlessly walking the streets of Lisbon and avoiding tourist-clogged places like the plague.\nKilometers on foot up and down Lisbon\u0026rsquo;s stairs, miles strolling along endless alleys, for all five days of the trip. Always carrying the weight of the working day on our shoulders, as if it were the Armadillo by Zerocalcare. Since my time is running out, I will mention only two really nice places and attach some photos of Lisbon\u0026rsquo;s holy stairways.\n1. The illegal Chinese restaurant One of those places where you wonder: how did they think of this? How did it occur to them? It is a completely normal apartment where walls have been knocked down to make room for\u0026hellip; a Chinese restaurant. Everything is obviously illegal: you enter through a normal doorway, climb the stairs, and arrive in the room with the tables. A place out of this world, with good food. But Chinese food is still Chinese food, and at night the fried stuff made itself felt. Here is a nice post explaining how to get there\n2. Chapito a Mesa This is a great classic: a small pub that also serves dinner, a nice place\u0026hellip; but wait. Where is the entrance? It is actually a cultural center hosting shows and artistic performances. Prices are good, the place has character, and in any case you can Google it, plenty of people talk about it, so I will not repeat them :)\nThat seems to be everything, so I can say goodbye.\nBy the way: by the end of the trip, my calves had come back to life. I was bouncing up and down the stairways, my breath had improved, and my lungs had recovered their original volume. Good training, those stairs.\n[gallery type=\u0026ldquo;rectangular\u0026rdquo; size=\u0026ldquo;medium\u0026rdquo; ids=\u0026ldquo;2349,2350,2351,2352,2353,2354,2355,2356,2357,2358,2359,2360,2361,2362,2363,2364,2365,2366\u0026rdquo; orderby=\u0026ldquo;rand\u0026rdquo;]\n","date":"2015-06-10","image":"/en/news/le-donne-di-lisbona-hanno-bei-polpacci/images/IMG_20150520_190101_hu_67cd8f025c3222e7.jpg","month":"2015-06","permalink":"/en/news/le-donne-di-lisbona-hanno-bei-polpacci/","summary":"…but so do the men, children, elderly people… in short, everyone, including us: me and Lucignolo, my trusted guide on trips abroad.\nSo the question is: why all this special attention to the calf muscle? Is it a Portuguese trait? Maybe. Is it simply my obsession? Yes, it is, but that is another matter. Is it this year’s fashion? I do not think so.\nThe answer is that this attention to that part of the body is rooted in an initially painful experience: imagine arriving in the morning from the airport by public transport, armed with a trolley suitcase, yes, the good old days of the Interrail backpack are over, and discovering that the road from the tram to the accommodation rises in an almost vertical direction. At first it looks like a sloping street full of cobblestones. Then you realize that the cobblestones, sworn enemies of the trolley suitcase, which must be carried on the shoulder if you do not want to destroy the wheels, gradually give way to an endless series of steps.\n","tags":[],"title":"The Women of Lisbon Have Beautiful Calves..."},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"I recently discovered the #italiasicura portal, which is described as\nThe map of construction sites for hydrogeological risk mitigation, new open data on works against landslides and floods municipality by municipality, and the status of emergencies region by region.\nIt seems to me an interesting tool from several points of view. Of course, it is also a political operation meant to show what the government is doing. Without entering into that debate, however, it still looks like a well-made tool, with interesting statistics. For example, did you know that damage to public and private assets amounts to around 3 billion euros?\nTwo other interesting aspects:\n1 Open data ISTAT, the Civil Protection Department, and ISPRA are the three data providers for this tool. And the data are all OPEN. Finally, a tool that aggregates open data that are otherwise scattered across the web. The hope is that other public institutions will soon accept the open-data challenge by making their archives accessible in a way that machines can also understand. Will we manage to do it at INGV? http://mappa.italiasicura.gov.it/#/opendata\n2. Open source The creators of this tool deserve credit: looking at the list of open-source tools they used, it is clear that they did not fixate on a single technology, which is what I call the geek approach. Instead, they used a modular approach, adopting different technologies for different purposes. To run the portal, they combine Python-based technologies, Java, JavaScript, OpenLayers, and other well-integrated technical components. Well done. http://mappa.italiasicura.gov.it/#/opensource\nConclusion Congratulations on the tool, at least from a technical point of view. The hope? That open data can be used even more effectively, and that institutions will open their archives efficiently. No empty talk, please.\nhttp://mappa.italiasicura.gov.it/\n","date":"2015-06-03","image":"/en/news/italiasicura/images/logo-big_hu_9b3a787cc511c297.png","month":"2015-06","permalink":"/en/news/italiasicura/","summary":"I recently discovered the #italiasicura portal, which is described as\nThe map of construction sites for hydrogeological risk mitigation, new open data on works against landslides and floods municipality by municipality, and the status of emergencies region by region.\nIt seems to me an interesting tool from several points of view. Of course, it is also a political operation meant to show what the government is doing. Without entering into that debate, however, it still looks like a well-made tool, with interesting statistics. For example, did you know that damage to public and private assets amounts to around 3 billion euros?\n","tags":[],"title":"#italiasicura"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"RDA stands for Research Data Alliance. It is a valuable community of people meeting and working together to do for data something close to what led to the establishment of the TCP/IP stack in the 1970s. In a scenario where no agreed directives exist for managing, using, reusing, producing, storing, and curating data, RDA aims to bring order and structure. It has therefore organized discussions, Requests for Comments (RFCs), best-practice recommendations, guideline documents, and other ongoing initiatives.\nThe Research Data Alliance also has institutional weight, as it is supported by the European Commission, the National Science Foundation and other U.S. agencies, and the Australian Government.\nIn this context, RDA is producing useful guideline documents that are worth reading. This time, I want to share its work on the important issue of Data Citation, which is closely related to persistent identifiers such as DOI or EPIC PID.\nData citation is both highly relevant and difficult to address. These guidelines may be a good starting point for structured discussion in many infrastructures that need to tackle the issue.\nDownloadable version of Recommendations on Making Data Citeable published\n","date":"2015-05-27","image":"/en/news/rda-recommendation-on-citing-data/images/rda-europe-porfolio_hu_3f9a0680ce8456d2.jpg","month":"2015-05","permalink":"/en/news/rda-recommendation-on-citing-data/","summary":"RDA stands for Research Data Alliance. It is a valuable community of people meeting and working together to do for data something close to what led to the establishment of the TCP/IP stack in the 1970s. In a scenario where no agreed directives exist for managing, using, reusing, producing, storing, and curating data, RDA aims to bring order and structure. It has therefore organized discussions, Requests for Comments (RFCs), best-practice recommendations, guideline documents, and other ongoing initiatives.\n","tags":[],"title":"RDA - recommendation on citing data"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"This presentation introduces:\nA path towards the implementation of a metadata-driven brokering system for integrating data from geological databases at INGV.\n","date":"2015-03-25","image":"/en/news/metadata-brokering-a-modern-approach/images/Schermata-2015-03-25-alle-12.40.25_hu_dbdecccf3fd9180e.png","month":"2015-03","permalink":"/en/news/metadata-brokering-a-modern-approach/","summary":"This presentation introduces:\nA path towards the implementation of a metadata-driven brokering system for integrating data from geological databases at INGV.\n","tags":["brokering","ingv","metadata"],"title":"Metadata \u0026 Brokering -  a modern approach"},{"categories":["crowdfunding","job","technology-ict"],"content":" “Equity-based crowdfunding” refers to cases in which an online investment is used to purchase an actual equity stake in a company: in this case, the “reward” for the funding consists of the full set of financial and administrative rights deriving from participation in the business.\nThis is how the CONSOB guide to equity crowdfunding begins. It is intended for anyone interested in the startup world, perhaps even planning to launch one, who wants to understand where to start.\n[CONTINUE READING ON LA FUCINA DI IDEE]\nHEADER IMAGE BY Bizking2u (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons\n","date":"2015-03-05","image":"/en/news/equity-crowdfunding-litalia-scende-in-campo/images/Geefunding_crowdfunding_hu_51ffc0896ea7a05e.png","month":"2015-03","permalink":"/en/news/equity-crowdfunding-litalia-scende-in-campo/","summary":" “Equity-based crowdfunding” refers to cases in which an online investment is used to purchase an actual equity stake in a company: in this case, the “reward” for the funding consists of the full set of financial and administrative rights deriving from participation in the business.\nThis is how the CONSOB guide to equity crowdfunding begins. It is intended for anyone interested in the startup world, perhaps even planning to launch one, who wants to understand where to start.\n","tags":["consob","crowdfunding","equity-crowdfunding","funding","legal"],"title":"Equity Crowdfunding: Italy Takes the Field"},{"categories":["crowdfunding","job","technology-ict"],"content":"From \u0026ldquo;La Fucina di Idee\u0026rdquo; - a blog about ideas, crowdfunding, creativity, and more.\nGood morning everyone!\nI have to say that this blog has grown much faster than I expected. At first, inspired by Timothy Ferriss\u0026rsquo;s book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, I threw myself into the world of ideas, crowdfunding, and startups. I started following some of the main actors in the crowdfunding scene, but above all I tried to understand how it worked, collecting resources and documents along the way.\nAfter a while, the first contacts from interested people arrived: a few phone calls, an email here and there. Now several people are starting to write asking for information, trying to better understand what crowdfunding is, or looking for advice on how to structure their own project.\nSo, to everyone I say: please be patient, I am getting organized! I cannot always reply to emails or find time for a call. [continue reading]\n","date":"2015-02-23","image":"/en/news/guida-al-crowdfunding-il-sito-dei-giovani-artisti-italiani/images/crowdfunding_hu_5d9a395a49767ec9.jpg","month":"2015-02","permalink":"/en/news/guida-al-crowdfunding-il-sito-dei-giovani-artisti-italiani/","summary":"From “La Fucina di Idee” - a blog about ideas, crowdfunding, creativity, and more.\nGood morning everyone!\nI have to say that this blog has grown much faster than I expected. At first, inspired by Timothy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, I threw myself into the world of ideas, crowdfunding, and startups. I started following some of the main actors in the crowdfunding scene, but above all I tried to understand how it worked, collecting resources and documents along the way.\n","tags":[],"title":"Guide to Crowdfunding: the Italian Young Artists Website"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"As a major solid Earth science infrastructure, EPOS was recently included in the EGI Competence Centers call, where it will develop a pilot to test selected EGI technologies, including solutions for implementing AAAI.\nMy article in the EGI newsletter briefly explains what EPOS is and outlines possible areas of collaboration with EGI.\nLink to the online article Link to the full EGI newsletter issue (PDF)\n","date":"2015-02-20","image":"/en/news/epos-an-e-infrastructure-to-integrate-solid-earth-science-data/images/EGI_logo_large01_hu_36fe99b9f55e907f.jpg","month":"2015-02","permalink":"/en/news/epos-an-e-infrastructure-to-integrate-solid-earth-science-data/","summary":"As a major solid Earth science infrastructure, EPOS was recently included in the EGI Competence Centers call, where it will develop a pilot to test selected EGI technologies, including solutions for implementing AAAI.\nMy article in the EGI newsletter briefly explains what EPOS is and outlines possible areas of collaboration with EGI.\nLink to the online article Link to the full EGI newsletter issue (PDF)\n","tags":[],"title":"EPOS: an e-Infrastructure to integrate Solid Earth Science data"},{"categories":["job","technology-ict"],"content":"Because of my job at INGV, where I am involved in the major EPOS European Project, I spend a lot of time reading papers, blog posts, and other resources, not to mention discussing with great colleagues, all dealing with the central subject of system interoperability.\nActually, the real topic for me is interoperability, whose meanings vary across the fields of knowledge, and life, in which we use the concept. In the social sciences we may call it interculturality or interculturalism. In economics, we might call it price, the mechanism that enables exchange of goods. But that is another story, and I think the idea is clear.\nSome more concrete interoperability-related topics I deal with include microservices and everything related to web services. Web services are one of the main concepts, and technologies, that enable system interoperability.\nRESTful web services are now widely used. They basically rely on HTTP, are reasonably human-readable, and are certainly machine-understandable. Their main advantage is ease of use. In the following example, by copying and pasting the URL into your browser, you access a free weather service through a RESTful API request:\nhttp://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London,uk You then receive a somewhat unusual but fairly human-readable response, perhaps with a few line breaks, telling you what the weather is like in London. Just for fun, here is a list of public RESTful API providers. By the way, Facebook and Twitter require you to be logged in to use their RESTful APIs.\nWhen creating a RESTful web service, it is useful to know that it can reach different degrees of maturity depending on how much it exploits the power of HTTP.\nThese different levels of maturity were modeled by L. Richardson in the Richardson Maturity Model, which is well described and analyzed in this excellent post by Martin Fowler.\nAccording to this model, a RESTful service can be graded from 0 to 3, where 3 designates a truly RESTful API. In Martin Fowler\u0026rsquo;s words,\nRichardson Maturity Model provides a good step by step way to understand the basic ideas behind restful thinking,\nand what is really interesting is\nits relationship to common design techniques.\nLevel 1 tackles the question of handling complexity by using divide and conquer, breaking a large service endpoint down into multiple resources Level 2 introduces a standard set of verbs so that we handle similar situations in the same way, removing unnecessary variation Level 3 introduces discoverability, providing a way of making a protocol more self-documenting. Reading the full article helps you become more familiar with HTTP concepts and understand the real nature of HTTP. I was also surprised by the power and richness of HTTP itself, including verbs and hypermedia controls. It is a communication protocol that deserves special attention because of its widespread use in so many kinds of communication.\nLast but not least, I discovered that Leonard Richardson is quite a unique person: programmer, musician, and writer with a hacker mindset. Have a look at his eclectic website.\nLink to the article: Richardson Maturity Model by Martin Fowler.\n","date":"2015-02-17","image":"/en/news/interoperability-and-richardson-maturity-model/images/overview_hu_3b0d1d0b6919193e.png","month":"2015-02","permalink":"/en/news/interoperability-and-richardson-maturity-model/","summary":"Because of my job at INGV, where I am involved in the major EPOS European Project, I spend a lot of time reading papers, blog posts, and other resources, not to mention discussing with great colleagues, all dealing with the central subject of system interoperability.\nActually, the real topic for me is interoperability, whose meanings vary across the fields of knowledge, and life, in which we use the concept. In the social sciences we may call it interculturality or interculturalism. In economics, we might call it price, the mechanism that enables exchange of goods. But that is another story, and I think the idea is clear.\n","tags":["integration","interoperability","restful-services","richardson-maturity-model","web","webservices"],"title":"Interoperability and Richardson Maturity Model"},{"categories":["job","ordinary-beauty","technology-ict"],"content":"This photo deserves to be at the center of the page. It is memorable.\nWhy? I will explain immediately: anyone with a scientific eye will already have understood that I was presenting a poster. I was at EGU in Vienna. The guy next to me, wearing purple trousers, a black shirt, a black silk scarf with white doves, and a biker-style jacket, and I assure you that the hair is not a wig but real 1970s hair, may look like a hippie picked up at the last minute from the city streets. In reality, he is a great mind, and is seriously at risk of becoming my IT guru: his name is Keith J. Jeffery. He is a true heavyweight in European IT architectures, with many titles. An excerpt from one of his bios says: \u0026ldquo;Keith Jeffery is currently Director of IT and International Strategy of STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK.\u0026rdquo; He also holds various other titles, director here, president there, has worked on Grid, now works on Cloud, and many other interesting things that I will skip.\nBesides being very nice, eclectic, and singular, there are several other characteristics we share: he plays guitar and is a real rocker. But most of all, he has a fascinating way of reasoning. He thinks systemically. I am not sure whether this is how geniuses think, because I have personally met only a few, but they do indeed seem to think in similar ways.\nWhile I was presenting the poster, he was there with me as a co-author. In the quiet moments between one conversation and another with people who wanted information about our charming and incomprehensible diagrams, we started drafting a work plan for the following months. That is when I saw genius at work. It was wonderful: it felt like being back at university, in the days of theoretical computer science.\nWhen planning the activities needed to build the project\u0026rsquo;s infrastructure, any ordinary nerd would have started by installing something and hacking around. He approached the matter from a completely different angle: \u0026ldquo;first of all, we need four models to fully describe the system,\u0026rdquo; he explained to me, \u0026ldquo;one for users, one for data, one for resources, and one for processing.\u0026rdquo; And he continued: \u0026ldquo;then we need to find the interfaces among the different models and examine user-system, system-system, and data-processing interactions\u0026rdquo;\u0026hellip; and so on in that vein.\nIn the end, our Excel file contained a list of about fifty tasks, none of which was intelligible to a normal human being, and only a couple of which were understandable to a nerd, such as \u0026ldquo;install PostgreSQL\u0026rdquo;. Everything else dealt with abstract objects, their interactions, and strategies to define them by first proposing a simplified schema, then asking the community for feedback, and finally putting the pieces together.\nOf course, my neurons were chasing his, trying to capture as much as possible. After compiling the list, I subjected him to shock treatment: a good half hour of questions to make sure I had understood what we had just written. I pried open his skull with a can opener and found a mine. Exceptional.\nNow all that remains is to work with him, learning as much as possible. And upgrading my way of thinking.\nIf I crash, I will reboot.\n","date":"2013-04-16","image":"","month":"2013-04","permalink":"/en/news/lavorare-con-un-genio-egu-3/","summary":"This photo deserves to be at the center of the page. It is memorable.\nWhy? I will explain immediately: anyone with a scientific eye will already have understood that I was presenting a poster. I was at EGU in Vienna. The guy next to me, wearing purple trousers, a black shirt, a black silk scarf with white doves, and a biker-style jacket, and I assure you that the hair is not a wig but real 1970s hair, may look like a hippie picked up at the last minute from the city streets. In reality, he is a great mind, and is seriously at risk of becoming my IT guru: his name is Keith J. Jeffery. He is a true heavyweight in European IT architectures, with many titles. An excerpt from one of his bios says: “Keith Jeffery is currently Director of IT and International Strategy of STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK.” He also holds various other titles, director here, president there, has worked on Grid, now works on Cloud, and many other interesting things that I will skip.\n","tags":["egu","keith-jeffery","ordinary-beauty","technology"],"title":"Working with an Enlightened Mind (not an ENEL advertisement) (EGU #3)"},{"categories":["job","reflections","technology-ict"],"content":"\nWhat does Rocco Siffredi have to do with Google and technology?\nThe common point is clear: the display of enormous power, sexual in one case and computational in the other. I leave it to the reader to guess which one is Google and which one is Siffredi.\nThe parallel appeared very clearly in my mind when I listened to a talk here at EGU (read this post to discover what EGU is) about Google\u0026rsquo;s new search and computation engine for Earth sciences, EarthEngine.\nIMAGE By Niccolo Caranti (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons\nA guy arrives in jeans and a black T-shirt, confident and relaxed, as if he were heading to the pub for a beer with friends.\nThen he begins: \u0026ldquo;my presentation will not be like the ones you have seen so far.\u0026rdquo; Of course, he immediately has to be different. And he continues: \u0026ldquo;for fifteen years I worked in research doing things the wrong way. Now I have joined Google and started doing things the right way.\u0026rdquo; Damn. Who are you? He goes on: \u0026ldquo;at Google we start from a simple assumption: computing power and storage capacity are infinite resources, for us.\u0026rdquo;\nFine\u0026hellip; if you want to show that you are the coolest, why not come here and give each of us 50 euros?\nThe rest of the talk is easy to imagine: a parade of the fantastic features of the online software they had created. In everything he said, in his language, body language, tone of voice, and posture, this simple and incontestable truth, for them, came through: they are the coolest, and Google, worshipped almost like a deity, is good, generous, loves us, and above all is stronger than everyone. Nobody will destroy it, it does beautiful things, it is beautiful to work there, and it is beautiful to use it. Google and Ken Shiro. Google and Rocco Siffredi.\nAt the end, during the questions, the guy became almost aggressive. Example: Question: \u0026ldquo;what assurance do we have that the service will still be active in ten years?\u0026rdquo; Answer from the Google guy: \u0026ldquo;none\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip;.silence\u0026hellip;. Then he resumed: \u0026ldquo;what assurance do you have that you will still be alive in two years?\u0026rdquo; \u0026hellip;. I wanted to touch iron.\nNow, to avoid hypocrisy, I admit that Google seems attractive to me too. I wonder what it would be like to work there, not only because I imagine the salaries are high, but also because when you work with Google you know you are working for a company that represents the best the market has to offer.\nHowever, one disturbing element that makes me think, among many others, is the reverence with which Google employees talk about it. At times it really seems to be God for them. There is something religious in the way they describe or refer to it.\nThe guy then left after the canonical fifteen minutes dedicated to presentations, inviting the whole audience to visit their stand for a demonstration of EarthEngine. I went there, and it does indeed do beautiful things, but it leaves me doubtful when I think about how much a scientist can actually use it. In fact, both the strength and the limitation of Google products is that they create technologies that work extremely well and are very simple, but have limited flexibility. Google Search itself is exceptional, especially now that autocomplete seems to read your mind, but if I wanted, for example, a list of pages containing a personal biography of every person named \u0026ldquo;Ignazio\u0026rdquo;, things would become more complex: I would receive tons of results and then have to select them manually. For complex searches it is therefore not very suitable: this is why I remain somewhat hesitant about the possible use of a tool like EarthEngine.\nTime will tell.\nIn the meantime, their Rocco-Siffredi-ness will remain unchanged, perhaps even increase together with the enormous size of everything they have: computing, storage, users. All we can do is be aware of it and not be deceived by size, which matters a little, but is not everything.\n","date":"2013-04-13","image":"","month":"2013-04","permalink":"/en/news/google-il-rocco-siffredi-della-tecnologia-egu2/","summary":"\nWhat does Rocco Siffredi have to do with Google and technology?\nThe common point is clear: the display of enormous power, sexual in one case and computational in the other. I leave it to the reader to guess which one is Google and which one is Siffredi.\nThe parallel appeared very clearly in my mind when I listened to a talk here at EGU (read this post to discover what EGU is) about Google’s new search and computation engine for Earth sciences, EarthEngine.\nIMAGE By Niccolo Caranti (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons\n","tags":["egu","ken-shiro","research","reflections","rocco-siffredi","technology"],"title":"Google: the Rocco Siffredi of Technology (EGU #2)"},{"categories":["job","reflections","technology-ict","life-travel"],"content":"I have various friends and acquaintances outside my work circle with whom I often end up talking about my activities. Every time, surprisingly, I discover how hard it is to explain what happens at these conferences or meetings I sometimes attend.\nHaving already given up on answering the fatal question \u0026ldquo;what do you do for a living?\u0026rdquo; when asked by non-specialists over 70, I now try to explain how a congress such as EGU works. I once tried saying: \u0026ldquo;I work in EPOS, a European project dealing with the integration of research infrastructures for Earth sciences; now I work on metadata collection for the creation of a catalogue that will allow data discovery and integration.\u0026rdquo; The result was bewildered looks, mechanical \u0026ldquo;ah, interesting\u0026rdquo; replies, and other scenes I will spare you.\nMaybe one day I will manage to explain what I do before uttering the magic word \u0026ldquo;earthquakes\u0026rdquo;. Very indirectly, one could say that I also work on that. Very indirectly. Very.\nSo, this year too I am attending EGU. What is EGU? It is the European Geoscience Union General Assembly. In practice, it is a huge congress, around 30,000 people, where scientists working on Earth sciences meet to discuss new discoveries, compare the state of the art in specific disciplines, show their work, and build contacts. In all academic environments, periodic meetings are held so people can tell each other what they are doing and understand where the field is going. If this congress must be classified, it belongs in that broad category of academic meetings.\nThroughout the day there are presentations on many Earth-science topics: from seismology to energy and the environment, from hydrology to computer science applied to systems for storing and sharing data. There are many of them: from 8:30 in the morning until 8:00 in the evening, there are more than 60 parallel presentations every fifteen minutes and more than 800 posters presented every day. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: 2,880 oral presentations per day.\nIn short, it is a huge mess, and when you arrive you need to pick up the program, a 300-page booklet, to understand which sessions interest you.\nWithin this congress, I work on the \u0026ldquo;IT part\u0026rdquo; of an Earth-science project, let us call it that without going into details that are hard to digest for non-IT people. This year, as last year, I move among three things: 1. the project booth, 2. internal meetings and congress sessions, 3. the poster presentation.\nThe project booth [caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_262\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignleft\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;300\u0026rdquo;] EPOS Booth Team[/caption]\nI like to call it \u0026ldquo;the barber shop\u0026rdquo;. Although it was created as a place to provide information about the project and its ongoing initiatives, it often turns into a place where people come to grab the available gadgets: pens, very cool brochures, pins, and this year even M\u0026amp;Ms with a custom logo.\n[caption id=\u0026ldquo;attachment_253\u0026rdquo; align=\u0026ldquo;alignright\u0026rdquo; width=\u0026ldquo;224\u0026rdquo;] the gadgets[/caption]\nThey then stop to consume our time as well. They get enthusiastic, come over, tell you what they do, narrate their life story, and explain that they can predict earthquakes without error. When asked where these miraculous abilities come from, they reply with the innocent clarity of a child still playing with Barbie dolls: they have rigorous scientific models. In other words, pure fantasy.\nJust like in a barber shop, idle people of various kinds stop by to tell stories, acquaintances arrive needing a table on which to place their laptop and check email, and people looking for friendship seek the human contact that only we at EPOS, oozing Italian warmth from every pore in this cold northern-European setting, joking, can give them.\nIn the photo next to this paragraph, you can see a historic moment: several ICT people, including me, meet to discuss the functional diagram of a system for storing, staging, PID-ing, and managing seismological data and metadata.\nAfter so much IT solitude, I finally found myself with other extremely competent people with whom I could discuss and learn. We managed to develop a shared vision and agree on the next steps. As far as I am concerned, I will work with other colleagues from INGV on a prototype for storing seismological data and metadata based on CouchDB or other NoSQL databases. Very cool, in short.\nMeetings and sessions The various meetings and sessions, the ones held in batches of 60 in parallel, are very interesting. In the former, people mostly discuss family business, meaning internal project matters. For example: volcanologists are building a node that will distribute data and services to EPOS, so they need to meet face to face and agree on how to build it, which data to share, who should receive them, how to distribute them, and so on.\nI imagine all this may seem almost superfluous to an external observer, but the reality is that when you try to do something with others, especially in science, everyone approaches the problem from their own background, and it usually takes time to define the subject. Even when discussing purely IT topics, scientific issues often emerge, and hours of persuasion, comparison, brainwashing, lobotomy, and other extreme methods may be needed to clarify that, at that moment, the question is simply: \u0026ldquo;do you want to share the data with everyone or only with the colleague next door?\u0026rdquo;\nThe sessions, instead, are the so-called oral talks, where people present the results of their work, often connected to a scientific publication. Today I listened to a fantastic one by the Google people. But that deserves a separate post.\nBefore that, I leave you with a little gem: the photo below.\nSee you later.\n","date":"2013-04-10","image":"/en/news/un-congresso-di-geoscienziati-alias-egu-1/images/527661_465835656794200_261184022_n_hu_d4651bda09ac1b4c.jpeg","month":"2013-04","permalink":"/en/news/un-congresso-di-geoscienziati-alias-egu-1/","summary":"I have various friends and acquaintances outside my work circle with whom I often end up talking about my activities. Every time, surprisingly, I discover how hard it is to explain what happens at these conferences or meetings I sometimes attend.\nHaving already given up on answering the fatal question “what do you do for a living?” when asked by non-specialists over 70, I now try to explain how a congress such as EGU works. I once tried saying: “I work in EPOS, a European project dealing with the integration of research infrastructures for Earth sciences; now I work on metadata collection for the creation of a catalogue that will allow data discovery and integration.” The result was bewildered looks, mechanical “ah, interesting” replies, and other scenes I will spare you.\n","tags":["egu","reflections","software","technology","technology-ict","life"],"title":"A Congress of Geoscientists? (alias: EGU #1)"}]