1st PaNOSC Annual Meeting

[Brian McMahon]

I've just returned from a very enjoyable two days at the 1st PaNOSC Annual Meeting in Trieste (https://indico.esrf.fr/indico/event/36/overview). PaNOSC is one of the "cluster projects" intended to provide a gathering point for various ESFRI projects and landmarks to connect to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It is complemented by ExPaNDS, a federation of 10 national Photon and Neutron research infrastructures with a similar mandate, and considerable emphasis was given during the meeting to the good working relationships between the two bodies, with suggestions that they align their activities more closely, perhaps even holding joint annual meetings in future.

For me as an "external" participant, this was my first direct exposure to the project, but my impression of the two-day session, very ably coordinated by our CommDat colleague Andy Goetz, was that it represents a community with a fairly clear vision of the uses and opportunities of EOSC, with a capable management structure, and with a sensible collection of Work Packages with real (though occasionally ambitious) goals, timetables and implementation plans.

I had been asked to talk about "FAIR crystallographic data", and thought it useful to explain how our community's focus (as expressed by the very title of its standards project, the Crystallographic Information Framework), was to develop a holistic view of the information continuum, to treat "metadata" and "data" on the same footing, and to ensure that data and literature together were necessary for the complete record of science. It seemed to be held that this was a very helpful philosophy (in terms of an established scientific community supporting the justification for EOSC and similar large-scale data-centric infrastructure initiatives).

Presentations from the session are available at https://indico.esrf.fr/indico/event/36/contributions, including my Powerpoint as delivered; but there is also a slightly condensed and annotated PDF version here that might convey more clearly what I was trying to get across.

Brian