A Help Desk to support Data Sharing in Environmental Research Communities

Environmental research is more and more involving multidisciplinary communities, where different research groups are providing different data. To foster interdisciplinary research, scientists need to exchange and integrate data and metadata, and informatics offers a growing number of means to address data interoperability across environmental subjects. We propose a Help Desk (HD) that provides facilities and services to support data interoperability among research groups of the RITMARE project. The HD aims at enabling research groups to share their data through the RITMARE Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), an interoperable infrastructure built to enhance the (open) access and reuse of data inside the project community. In Section 2 (Methods) we briefly introduce the issues at stake and describe the HD design. We report in section 3 (Results) the HD implementation in our research framework and the HD impact on RITMARE community. We finally discuss in Section 4 if the HD could be exported in other environmental research communities.