Step 1: User research and design

This step is often overlooked, but is key for optimizing the impact of what you ultimately aim to develop. Here, our staff interacts with you and/or other researchers from your community, through workshops and surveys, to make sure that:

• A) The right problem is identified
• B) Researchers can relate to it
• C) The way we plan to address it (e.g. through tools or workflows) really makes an impact.

Estimated time investment: typically in the order of 10 hours for 4-5 involved people, with a wider group more sporadically involved (e.g. by answering a survey)

Products at the of this step can include: Scenario’s, Mockup’s, Mapped-out workflows, Surveys

Step 2: Establishing or updating best practices

With the user research and the design step finished, you now have the right ingredients in your hand to confidently start developing, or improving a data sharing service. Such a service could be in the form of a tool, a workflow, a (standardized) data collection, vocabularies, or other. Depending on what you develop, this can have impact on how you would like researchers, from your own community or beyond, to share their data. You can capture this by developing or updating the best practices for sharing data. Current best practices for sharing data from MSL domains are listed here. You can help develop these further!

Estimated time investment: this can vary, but a best practice generally takes 1-5 days to draft or update, by 1-2 persons.

Product at the end of this step: (updated) best practice for data sharing, (of which the key ingredients are) published on the MSL data catalogue

Step 3: Data service development and integration in EPOS

While the above steps typically require limited input from researchers involved in your project (where needed supported by us), this last step often requires a dedicated software or data engineer on your end, who closely interacts with MSL developers. A data service can be a tool for data exploration, analysis, or processing, a workflow, a (standardized) data collection, harmonized metadata standards, or other. Whatever it is you wish to develop, we can help each other most if it can ultimately fit in the MSL data infrastructure, and/or services provided to the EPOS data portal. That way, we can make sure that we can durably host your new development, even after your project ends.

Estimated time investment: obviously will depend on what needs to be developed, but typically in the range of 0.5 to 3 years, at 1 FTE.

Products at the end of this step: a new data service, ideally integrated directly within the EPOS infrastructure, but at minimum referred to in EPOS.