Managing and sharing multidisciplinary information in human-environment observatories: feedbacks and recommendations from the French DRIIHM network

Abstract

The LabEx DRIIHM is a research network that gathers together 13 Human-Environment Observatories (OHM) focused on anthropogenically modified socio-ecosystems in France and worldwide. Within the open science context, a Research Data Infrastructure (RDI) was implemented brick by brick to describe, visualize, and disseminate multidisciplinary long-tail datasets produced by the DRIIHM community. The RDI contains both tools and standards at the network scale, and specific tools at the individual observatory scale. This paper describes the building blocks of the RDI and analyses its strengths and challenges on the basis of engineer feedback and user surveys. Recommendations for improving the RDI, better measuring its effectiveness, and enhancing open science awareness, have been formalized for the SO-DRIIHM project that will start in 2020. Cross-disciplinary approaches using DataViz tools have emerged already, and these enrich the way in which scientific information is disseminated, and could raise new scientific issues.