ESSI2.5 Bridging Research through Integrated e-Infrastructures and Digital Services

Convener: Christian Pagé | Co-conveners: Magdalena Brus (EGI Foundation), Lesley Wyborn, Chris Atherton

Scientific discovery today increasingly depends on the availability and effective use of digital services and infrastructures that span the entire research workflow. From initial data generation and acquisition, through storage, processing, analysis, and collaboration, to dissemination and long-term preservation, researchers rely on a diverse ecosystem of tools that must interoperate seamlessly. While individual solutions exist for many of these steps, the real potential emerges when services are integrated across providers and disciplines, enabling researchers to work more efficiently, transparently, and at scale.

This session will showcase how e-infrastructure tools, services, and integration projects can support researchers in tackling complex scientific and societal challenges. We aim to highlight how interoperable digital services can complement each other to provide end-to-end support, how integration across infrastructures strengthens research capacity, and how collaboration between providers and communities can foster innovative solutions.
We particularly welcome contributions that:

By bringing together diverse perspectives from service providers, research infrastructures, and end users, this session will provide researchers with a unique overview of the digital landscape available to support their work. It will also foster dialogue on how different infrastructures can collaborate more effectively, and how the research community can take full advantage of integrated, sustainable digital solutions to advance both science and society.

ITS1.20/ESSI4.3 - Essential Variables for Global Cooperation and Interoperability

Convener: Anca Hienola | Co-conveners: Jacco Konijn, Marta Gutierrez (EGI Foundation), Matti Heikkurinen, Federico Drago (EGI Foundation)

The proliferation of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs), Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs), and Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) highlights a paradigm shift towards data-driven environmental monitoring and policy. These Essential Variables (EVs) are central to global frameworks, including GCOS, WMO, GEO, Copernicus, IPCC assessments, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For science, they are a powerful mechanism to track Earth system changes and enable evidence-based decision-making.
Yet, despite broad recognition, the scientific potential of EVs remains underrealised. Persistent gaps in how they are defined, described, managed, and exchanged across domains and infrastructures hamper progress. A lack of semantic and technical interoperability, inconsistent metadata practices, and fragmented governance limit their integration and reduce their impact on policy and action. Without a coherent, interoperable infrastructure, the transformative potential of EVs—to enable cross-domain science, support climate agreements, and monitor sustainability targets—remains out of reach.

This session will explore the technical, infrastructural, and policy advancements required to make EVs the foundational language for global environmental cooperation. We welcome contributions addressing scientific use cases, technical barriers, and emerging solutions under the following themes:

We invite scientists, data architects, and policymakers to share insights for building a coherent, actionable, and interoperable global observation system.