Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities

ENVRI - Environmental Sciences
SSHOC - Social Sciences and Humanities

Climate-neutral and Smart Cities are an integral part of the Horizon Europe framework programme. The purpose of this project is to facilitate the task of combining data from different domains to facilitate multi-disciplinary research.
The project has contributed to this Horizon science mission by combining resources from two Science Clusters. As part of the SSHOC consortium, ESS collects data related to political and social trust, health and health inequality, attitudes towards climate change and energy, understandings and evaluations of democracy and digital communication at work and with family, amongst many other topics related to the smart agenda.

Technical Challenge.
Many domains talk about the importance of multi-disciplinary research and the need to share data, but there are major challenges for data providers in supporting such research. Domain expertise and collaborative scientific work requires that data and methods are effectively shared. This emphasises the importance of provenance and processing metadata, in addition to the typical metadata requirements.

The project's technical resources and efforts are accessible via the ESS website, integrated into the EOSC Portal, supporting outreach and educational initiatives. Through the ESS Labs service, individuals can engage directly with the project, gaining practical experience. This hands-on access helps external parties understand and potentially adopt similar strategies within their own organisations and networks.

The methods and processing required to integrate this data and optimise it for multi-disciplinary use have been thoroughly documented, and can be accessed, by the researchers through an extension to the granular data documentation of the ESS, providing a unique degree of transparency. Results show the needed form of interoperability at several levels: organisational, scientific, semantic, and technical.

SSHOC and ENVRI FAIR have undertaken a case study to explore the practical aspects of supporting multi-disciplinary research, and have prototyped an application combining air quality data from the EEA, climate data from Copernicus, and social data from the ESS.

Resources