Preliminary consistent guidelines of good practices for vocabularies, formats, metadata and technical standards, including FAIR principles for data and software -  Deliverable D2.1 of the Climateurope2 project
Creators: name: Stockhause, Martina
name: Bärring, Lars
name: Bretonnière, Pierre-Antoine
name: Cripe, Douglas
name: Delju, Amir Hooshang
name: Krijger, Tjerk
name: Krzic, Aleksandra
name: Mihic, Dragan
name: Muñoz, Ángel G.
name: Pagé, Christian
name: Pamment, Alison
name: Pascoe, Charlotte L.
name: Spinuso, Alessandro
name: Thijsse, Peter
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: climate service
guideline
data
metadata
standard
best practice
interoperability
sustainability
climate change
vocabulary

description: This deliverable collates and discusses the state-of-the-art data management practices regarding vocabularies, formats, metadata and technical standards –including Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles– for processes related to climate services data and software. The analysis largely draws from existing literature and reports, but also from the experience of the co-authors. 

The document is organised in three main parts, discussing the current state-of-the-art and common practices regarding data, software and organisational standards (Section 2); the engagement of users in developing standards, guidance and protocols (Section 3); and missing elements, gaps, challenges and opportunities (Section 4).  

In summary, this report has found that: 



User engagement is essential for the development of climate services that meet the evolving needs (demand) of different sectors. Data and software processes in the climate services realm that are supply driven, do not tend to be fit for purpose, and hence tend to lack key desired attributes by stakeholders and decision makers, such as the actual required quality and reliability needed (although the services might be reliable and have quality in other senses).

FAIR principles for data and software have been and are widely used by the community involved in the production of data and software for climate services, but these principles have become guiding ones also outside said community, being complemented by implementation guidelines emphasising the roles of Persistent IDentifiers (PIDs) and metadata standards (see Section 2 for details). 

WMO Standards and Guiding Documents are usually the de facto protocols used by the climate service community, providing guidelines on many different dimensions of the services. These protocols are complemented by developments of good practices within the climate research community, such as those proposed by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP; in particular the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP) and by EU regulations such as the INSPIRE directive (infrastructure for Spatial Information In Europe). 

Quality management standards and institutional commitments are important for reliable and quality-assured climate service data and software co-development, production, delivery and use. 


Further analysis and input from climate service providers is required to get an overview how these different data management practice components are combined by individual (domain-specific) providers. With this prerequisite common sets of consistent guidelines for a variety of climate service providers can be derived in the final deliverable of this task 2.1.