ExPaNDS

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Photon and Neutron Data Service – ExPaNDS project federated ten European national Photon and Neutron research infrastructures (ALBA Synchrotron, DESY Synchrotron, Diamond Light Source, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, Helmoltz Zentrum Berlin, Helmoltz Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf, MAX IV, Paul Scherrer Institute, SOLEIL Synchrotron, UKRI STFC) and the e-infrastructure EGI, with the goal of expanding, accelerating and supporting the data management and data services provided through the EOSC for the photon and neutron (PaN) research community.

ExPaNDS, like the PaNOSC project, has strived to make the majority of PaN RIs’ data ‘open’ following the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) according to the user’s needs, and harmonised efforts to migrate facility’s data analysis workflows to EOSC platforms enabling them to be shared in a uniform way.

ExPaNDS aimed to:

• Enable EOSC services and to provide coherent FAIR data services to the scientific users of national Photon and Neutron sources
• Connect national PaN RIs through a platform of data analysis as a service for users from research institutes universities, industry etc.
• Develop and maintain a catalogue of data and analysis software for Photon and Neutron data
• Gather feedback and cooperate with the EOSC governance bodies to improve the EOSC and develop standard relationships between scientific publications, Photon and Neutron scientific dataset (raw data), experimental reports, instruments and authors (via ORCID)

The main goal was to set-up a distributed platform for data analysis, as a service for users from research institutes, universities, industry, etc., thus enabling EOSC services, and providing coherent FAIR data services to the scientific users of PaN sources.

This goal has been pursued in tight collaboration with the PaNOSC project, and its achievement were based on the work carried out and on the deliverables submitted in the frame of PaNOSC. Together, both projects maintained and developed a common FAIR data policy, metadata standards and search API; the PaN data portal, a catalogue of data and analysis software for PaN data; VISA, the Virtual Infrastructure for Scientific Analysis, and cooperated with the EOSC governance bodies to further improve the EOSC.

Moreover, the project worked to standardise and link all relevant catalogues to ensure that any scientific research communities have access to both the raw data collected that is linked to their session(s) at these facilities, and the relevant peer review articles produced as a direct result of their usage. In order to do this, ExPaNDS developed a common ontology for all the elements of these catalogues, a roadmap for the back-end architecture and functionalities (including APIs) and a powerful taxonomy strategy in line with the requirement of the EOSC user community.

In addition, the ExPaNDS and PaNOSC projects worked together for the development of the e-learning platform pan-learning.org and the training catalogue, for students and researchers interested in photon and neutron science.