A project that aims to increase European competitiveness in nanoscience and nanotechnology
As eXact lab, we bring all our experience and expertise in data management at any level, both from a technical point of view and from a data policy management and enforcement point of view, and we take care of the infrastructure that supports the project itself.
Starting with the collection of proposal data and organization of the proposals, we manage the datastore and all the interfaces with the underlying db that collects facilities information for the management of the instruments and will enable the evaluation committees to be able to review projects, feasibility, and compliance with all transnationality constraints.
In addition, a metadata superstructure is added to all collected data to better characterize how this data was obtained. In fact, when the data are uploaded they go through an ML system that adds the missing metadata. There is a portion of metadata that is related to the scientist and the instrument used (operational parameters, of the sample, etc.), but other metatadata is also added to catalog the data itself in order to be categorized for the extraction of scientifically relevant metadata (e.g., in the recognition of images from microscopes).
The tool we are going to create will be used by the project’s researchers and scientists to navigate the data by being able to search by different characteristics (metadata) on a mass of data that must be easily accessible by teams of different nationalities and must be organized in a way that is easy to find and reusable according to FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) principles.
This datastore will be a sharing platform among users participating in the projects and will collect all documents produced within the projects. It is a data management system, both in terms of documents (in a broader sense) and data from microscopes and all measuring instruments.
The AI/ML platform we are working on will serve for automatic classification of images in both supervised and unsupervised modes and it will also help to add information to all the data that had not been classified of the past. It is a classification voted to debunk the data and make FAIR what is not FAIR for a dataset revamping result.
NFFA-Europe is a distributed research infrastructure that integrates nanofoundries with accurate analyses available at large-scale European facilities and involves twenty-two partners from nine European Union member states (academic laboratories and SMEs).
The NFFA-Europe PILOT project is coordinated by the Materials Laboratory Institute of the National Research Council (CNR-Iom). It is a visionary project that aims to positively influence the European model of integration and interoperability of distributed research infrastructures.
Giuseppe Brandino (eXact lab), Data Management Axis Coordinator per il progetto NFFA-Europe PILOT
