A tool to meet FAIR principles

FAIR principles refer to the guidelines to optimise the reuse of data, both for humans and computers. GEOP4TH can be a valuable help to meet the Interoperable and Reusable components of FAIR.

Unlike the Findibility and Accessibility components, that mainly rely on the storage and access infrastructure, the Interoperable and Reusable components are rather intrinsic to the data themselves. Data preprocessing can therefore greatly contribute to reach these goals.

GEOP4TH is particularly fitted to assist in the use of open data formats, such as netCDF or GeoTIFF. These data formats are very appropriate to match the FAIR principles thanks to their usual compacity, international conventions, and large communities guaranteeing the perennity of the format, but their main downside is their complexity that requires to learn about the format as well as the tools for manipulating it. GEOP4TH provides an easy way to bypass this complexity.

For example, the Reusable component includes the R1.3 point: « (Meta)data meet domain-relevant community standards ». In Hydrology, the most appropriate convention for netCDF is the Climate and Forecast (CF) convention, which defines a standardised common way of netCDF organisation, documentation and vocabulary. GEOP4TH already includes most of the CF guidelines, and will completely integrate them in the near future. GEOP4TH is also intended to follow the OGC standards for GeoTIFF format.