Software Engineer Data Sharing Services for EPOS Multi-Scale Laboratories

We are looking for a software engineer to help us in further developing (web)services for international sharing of Earth scientific laboratory data. Data sharing takes place in the context of EPOS, the European Plate Observing System: a European network of research infrastructures for solid earth science, that facilitates the integrated use of open data and research facilities. The position will be embedded in the department of Earth Sciences of the faculty of Geosciences.

Your job
In Europe, the main access portal for international solid earth-scientific data is provided by EPOS. EPOS Multi-Scale Laboratories (MSL) is one of the ten discipline groups in EPOS and is coordinated at Utrecht University. It comprises a European community of approximately 100 geophysical research laboratories with varying expertise. An important aim of EPOS MSL is to make solid Earth scientific lab data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). To that end, MSL researchers publish data at various data repositories across Europe, frequently under an ‘open access’ license (e.g. CC BY 4.0). While this ensures that data can in principle be re-used by others, data availability remains highly fragmented across Europe, i.e. difficult to find by potential users. Moreover, metadata assigned to data publications are in many cases limited, unharmonized, or disparate.

In recent years, the EPOS MSL data catalogue was developed to make solid Earth scientific laboratory data, published in multiple repositories across Europe, centrally findable on a single website. The catalogue is developed building upon CKAN as a central catalogue to store and access data publications and laboratory and data repository information. Using custom built CKAN plugins, several functions have been added including a customised frontend. In addition to the CKAN catalogue, several webservices, harvesters and vocabulary management tools have been developed within a PHP/Laravel application supporting the management of the CKAN catalogue.

The main workflow functions as follows:

• custom harvesters gather metadata of relevant data publications at specific data repositories;
• metadata is harmonised and enriched before being stored in CKAN;
• presentation of enriched metadata in a structured, hierarchical form, for optimal findability of harvested data publications;
• aggregated metadata access is provided using webservices.

Notable other functionality:

• DataCite search query based on MSL terminology: Identifying MSL-relevant data publications, and where these are published;
• vocabulary describing MSL terminology accessible using web services and linked data formats.

As software engineer for EPOS Multi-Scale Laboratories you will contribute to:

• further development of the MSL data catalogue, and the related workflow and webservices;
• developing tooling to make MSL data more interoperable (e.g. harmonised data products, easy combination of data from multiple data publications);
• improving user experience, by making MSL data easier to explore interactively;
• designing the strategy to make MSL data more FAIR, together with a team of researchers, data scientists/managers and project managers.

You will work alongside another software engineer involved in EPOS Multi-Scale Laboratories.