Multi-hazard research brings together data, tools and expertise from several disciplines. For HOMEROS, an Open Science initiative funded under the OSCARS project to improve multi-hazard assessment and disaster preparedness in Greece, studying earthquakes, ground deformation, landslides and floods requires working with seismic waveforms, GNSS observations, InSAR data, and GIS layers drawn from different sources and research infrastructures.
But working across four institutions in Greece and Sweden creates practical challenges. Researchers needed access to common computing environments where they could use the same software, share code and intermediate results and develop workflows that others could reproduce. Computing capacity was not equally available across all partner institutions, particularly for more demanding processing and machine-learning tasks.
That's where HOMEROS turned to the EOSC EU Node for a shared environment in which these different needs could be brought together.
How HOMEROS uses the EOSC EU Node
The following EOSC EU Node services are in regular use across the project:
In practice the services are used together rather than in isolation: data are retrieved from open repositories into a notebook (using Python libraries) or a virtual machine, processed there and the resulting products are shared within the group before being published openly with a persistent identifier, rich metadata and an open Creative Commons licence (CC BY or CC BY-SA, allowing reuse with attribution) through the Zenodo HOMEROS-community repository.
- For seismological research, the team uses Interactive Notebooks to develop and run a machine-learning-assisted earthquake analysis workflow in JupyterLab. In one demonstrator, the workflow analysed data from 23 seismic stations during a period of intense seismic activity on the Central Ionian Islands in March 2024, producing an initial earthquake catalogue, visualisations and files for further analysis. The workflow has also supported the publication of a HOMEROS catalogue containing 7,420 earthquake events from the January–April 2024 Ionian Islands seismic activity.
Because the notebook provides the same environment to everyone in the group, researchers can work with shared code, parameters and results without each person having to recreate the setup locally. The same environment is also used to introduce Master’s students to machine-learning-assisted seismic analysis. - For geodetic research, HOMEROS uses Virtual Machines when workflows require specialised software that cannot easily be run in a notebook. One workflow processes 24-hour GNSS RINEX datasets (standardised satellite positioning data) to derive Integrated Water Vapour measurements, providing information on atmospheric moisture that can support the monitoring of conditions conducive to heavy rainfall and flooding. Virtual Machine snapshots allow the configured environment to be recovered and reused, making the workflow easier to reproduce and potentially suitable for continuous processing.
- File Sync & Share connects these activities by allowing notebooks, code, figures and results to be exchanged between partners before research outputs are published openly through the HOMEROS Zenodo community.
Together, these services have given us the flexibility to work in shared, reproducible environments while adapting the computing setup to the specific needs of each scientific task.
Angeliki Adamaki, Project Manager at Uppsala University, Sweden
Reasons for choosing the EOSC EU Node
The HOMEROS team turned to the EOSC EU Node because it offered:
- A Common European environment that no individual partner institution could provide to the whole consortium.
- Access across institutions: researchers can sign in using their academic credentials and work within the same institution-neutral environment.
- Flexible computing resources: the credit system allows the team to select resources according to the demands of a particular task rather than relying only on locally available hardware.
- Open-source foundations: the services align with the project’s commitment to open tools and reproducible research.
- Alignment with HOMEROS’ objectives: testing EOSC services in real research workflows and feeding experience back to the community forms part of the project’s work with the ENVRI and EOSC communities.
About HOMEROS
HOMEROS (Harmonising Observations from Multi-hazard Environments in Research for Open Science) is an Open Science project in Environmental and Earth Sciences, funded through OSCARS and supported by the ENVRI community. Coordinated by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the consortium brings together the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the University of Patras and Lund University. HOMEROS was among the early adopters of the EOSC EU Node and has continued to test its services in research and teaching workflows.
You can find all HOMEROS' open outputs in their Zenodo community repository at https://zenodo.org/communities/homeros/records