Collaboration
We provide the O2A framework for AWI's research but also to the earth and environment community as long-term "software as a service". You can use the O2A services as they are, especially in project-contexts where AWI is involved. O2A is an ecosystem of different integrated components and tools aligned with AWI's technical infrastructure. Of course, technical implementation is based on this infrastructure.
This section describes aspects of collaboration in terms of metadata and data content, offered services as well as detailed software development of O2A components.
The O2A components have been designed to provide solutions for managing the following types of related content.
Data
Metadata
Metadata on platforms, devices and sensors are described in O2A REGISTRY. There is a chief editor concept, where experts for thematic topics or projects should care about metadata structure, quality and harmonization. O2A SAMPLES takes care of metadata about samples. Have a closer look into the documentation of REGISTRY and SAMPLES.
Raw Data
Raw data can be automatically collected from different sources using O2A INGEST and stored in form of flat files or as data streams in time-series databases. To allow automatic data processing, archiving, publication and provision in web services (e.g., dashboard, streams, spatial data infrastructure, O2A uses pre-defined directory structures, standard data formats and basic quality flagging.
Three types of data ingestion are supported:
- automatic data ingestion in near-real time mode
- automatic data ingestion in delayed-mode
- manual data ingestion
Have a look into the documentation of INGEST. INGEST based data streams can be monitored with O2A DASHBOARD. Next to streams from INGEST, external data sources can be connected. Read more in the documentation of DASHBOARD.
Primary Data
Primary data and data products are derived from raw data. Scientific work can be self-managed in projects using O2A WORKSPACE. Our cloud supports provides access to user-tailored virtual machines and containers as well as a pre-configured Jupyter Notebook environment. For long-term archiving and data publication use PANGAEA.
Discovery
Metadata about platforms, devices and sensors, infrastructures, samples, datasets, publications, services as well as land campaigns and expeditions of research vessels are harvested into one index, supporting searching content. This harvesting also incluces O2A external sources and is accessible for users with O2A PORTAL, e.g. the Marine Data Portal or the Earth Data Portal.
Would you like to manage your data flows with O2A?
We are happy if you contact us by the 💬 feedback form or o2a-support@awi.de.
Responsibility
As O2A follows an agile software development process, each O2A component or product has a product owner. The product owner is responsible for vision, wishes and requirements and maximizing the value of the software product for the community. This targeted view is merged and harmonized in the O2A strategic leader group. The members of the leader group have decades of experiences in natural science, research data management, information technology and software development.
Do you have ideas improving an O2A component?
We are happy if you contact us by the 💬 feedback form or o2a-support@awi.de.
Contributing
Contributions to O2A are very welcome. We mainly distinguish three types of contributions:
Feedback - We heartily invite you to give us feedback and describe what you like to have and makes your life easier. Our product owner will check your feedback, map and prioritize it into our goals to improve the software continuously.
Significant Contributions - You are missing some major part in O2A and want to contribute within a project-context? One way is to negotiate a project-membership with financed effort for the desired feature in mind. On the other hand we are willing to integrate a developer for efforts about at least 3 person months (including training period, development, unit tests, review and integration tests).
Join the Team - The preferred way is to join the development team permanently! This option makes sense if you are willing to contribute at least 10-20% working time for at least one year. Focus is on contributions for the community as defined by the product owner. The developer gets a thematic training period, attends and contributes to agile meetings and feels responsible for the product. Read more in the development section.
Do you like to contribute?
Send us a mail o2a-support@awi.de and describe how you like to contribute.
The contribution process should look like this:
- Provide a draft for extensions or changes (max. 2 pages). The draft should cover the contribution type, strategic impact, the value for the community (also who is the community) and a rough effort estimate. It should be as concrete as possible.
- Get in contact with us o2a-support@awi.de.
- We will decide if and how we can integrate your contribution. This covers also an estimation for the technical impact and effort for core functionality or extensions.
- We get in touch with you and discuss the approach.
You don't like to contribute but use O2A?
Have a look to our public available application programming interfaces (API).