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RDA stands for Research Data Alliance. It is a valuable community of people meeting and working together to do for data something close to what led to the establishment of the TCP/IP stack in the 1970s. In a scenario where no agreed directives exist for managing, using, reusing, producing, storing, and curating data, RDA aims to bring order and structure. It has therefore organized discussions, Requests for Comments (RFCs), best-practice recommendations, guideline documents, and other ongoing initiatives. ...

This presentation introduces: A path towards the implementation of a metadata-driven brokering system for integrating data from geological databases at INGV.

“Equity-based crowdfunding” refers to cases in which an online investment is used to purchase an actual equity stake in a company: in this case, the “reward” for the funding consists of the full set of financial and administrative rights deriving from participation in the business. This is how the CONSOB guide to equity crowdfunding begins. It is intended for anyone interested in the startup world, perhaps even planning to launch one, who wants to understand where to start. ...

From “La Fucina di Idee” - a blog about ideas, crowdfunding, creativity, and more. Good morning everyone! I have to say that this blog has grown much faster than I expected. At first, inspired by Timothy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, I threw myself into the world of ideas, crowdfunding, and startups. I started following some of the main actors in the crowdfunding scene, but above all I tried to understand how it worked, collecting resources and documents along the way. ...

As a major solid Earth science infrastructure, EPOS was recently included in the EGI Competence Centers call, where it will develop a pilot to test selected EGI technologies, including solutions for implementing AAAI. My article in the EGI newsletter briefly explains what EPOS is and outlines possible areas of collaboration with EGI. Link to the online article Link to the full EGI newsletter issue (PDF)

Because of my job at INGV, where I am involved in the major EPOS European Project, I spend a lot of time reading papers, blog posts, and other resources, not to mention discussing with great colleagues, all dealing with the central subject of system interoperability. Actually, the real topic for me is interoperability, whose meanings vary across the fields of knowledge, and life, in which we use the concept. In the social sciences we may call it interculturality or interculturalism. In economics, we might call it price, the mechanism that enables exchange of goods. But that is another story, and I think the idea is clear. ...

This photo deserves to be at the center of the page. It is memorable. Why? I will explain immediately: anyone with a scientific eye will already have understood that I was presenting a poster. I was at EGU in Vienna. The guy next to me, wearing purple trousers, a black shirt, a black silk scarf with white doves, and a biker-style jacket, and I assure you that the hair is not a wig but real 1970s hair, may look like a hippie picked up at the last minute from the city streets. In reality, he is a great mind, and is seriously at risk of becoming my IT guru: his name is Keith J. Jeffery. He is a true heavyweight in European IT architectures, with many titles. An excerpt from one of his bios says: “Keith Jeffery is currently Director of IT and International Strategy of STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK.” He also holds various other titles, director here, president there, has worked on Grid, now works on Cloud, and many other interesting things that I will skip. ...

What does Rocco Siffredi have to do with Google and technology? The common point is clear: the display of enormous power, sexual in one case and computational in the other. I leave it to the reader to guess which one is Google and which one is Siffredi. The parallel appeared very clearly in my mind when I listened to a talk here at EGU (read this post to discover what EGU is) about Google’s new search and computation engine for Earth sciences, EarthEngine. IMAGE By Niccolo Caranti (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ...

I have various friends and acquaintances outside my work circle with whom I often end up talking about my activities. Every time, surprisingly, I discover how hard it is to explain what happens at these conferences or meetings I sometimes attend. Having already given up on answering the fatal question “what do you do for a living?” when asked by non-specialists over 70, I now try to explain how a congress such as EGU works. I once tried saying: “I work in EPOS, a European project dealing with the integration of research infrastructures for Earth sciences; now I work on metadata collection for the creation of a catalogue that will allow data discovery and integration.” The result was bewildered looks, mechanical “ah, interesting” replies, and other scenes I will spare you. ...