PIA future investment programme projects

GAIA DATA PROJECT

Towards a distributed data and services platform for Earth observation

Coordinator: CNRS

The GAIA Data project is being led by the three digital research infrastructures integral to the national roadmap—CLIMERI-France, the National Biodiversity Data Centre (PNDB) and Data Terra—and by 21 partners.

The project’s ambition is to develop and implement an integrated and distributed data and services platform to observe, model and understand the Earth system, biodiversity and the environment. These services, aimed at the scientific community and public and socio-economic stakeholders, will be accessible via portals supporting inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research. They are built around multi-source data from satellites, ships, aircraft, drones, submersibles, balloons, in-situ devices, inventories, observatories and experiments, as well as from reference simulations.

This structure, built around interconnected, science-led data and services centres, will afford access to different sources of data and provide a continuum of distributed services for data storage (notably accommodating large volumes of satellite data and modelling), processing (including use of computing and artificial intelligence resources), data cross-correlation, analysis and visualization.

This platform will provide integrated FAIR services spanning the full data cycle from acquisition through to exploitation in a broad variety of scientific applications to boost their uptake, extraction and cross-correlation, encourage their ‘intelligent’ reuse, ease interactions and checking of their integrity, quality, veracity and provenance in different use cases.

GAIA Data was assessed by an international panel for the PIA3 programme’s EquipEx+ call for proposals, obtaining an A+ grade and a very positive assessment. The project has been allocated a budget of €16.2 million and its total cost will be €62 million over eight years. It got underway in June 2021.

The 21 partners involved in the project are CNRS (coordinator), CNES, Ifremer, IRD, BRGM, IGN, INRAE, Meteo-France, the National natural history museum, CEA, IPGP, CINES, Sorbonne University, Grenoble-Alpes University, University of Lille, Federal University of Toulouse, UNISTRA, SHOM, OCA, FRB and CERFACS.