Need Help? Designing and Implementing the RITMARE Help Desk to Support Research Data Management

In the last decades, the openness of geographic information has been strongly influenced by Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiatives. These web-based electronic infrastructures are developed to coordinate the production, access, and use of geospatial data among producers and users. To be better exploited by their users, SDIs need to be populated with data according to specific technical and policy requirements, also in order to assure interoperability between data belonging to different thematic areas. RITMARE, a Flagship project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, involved a heterogeneous community of research groups working on different marine disciplinary domains (physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, geophysics, geology, ecosystem, molecular life sciences, fishing and agriculture, coastal system) and which are differently equipped of data management knowledge and skills. After three years of project, we have found that RITMARE SDI does not host the expected number of data resources produced during the project nor was the RITMARE Data Policy fully addressed, yet. This suggest that data flows through RITMARE SDI (Fig. 1) need to be assisted in order to support research groups with different data management backgrounds to exploit benefits of RITMARE SDI. The RITMARE Helpdesk support unit was then (I) designed by taking into account the different data management needs of research groups and by addressing both their technological and formative enablement (Fig. 2), and (II) implemented through a three modules of facilities and services provided through an online platform, a website and a permanently dedicated taskforce to differentially assists RITMARE research groups (Fig. 3). These three activities modules provide different levels of educational and technological support and are identified with three types of actions: 1.the learning (1) and training (2) modules consist of educational web-facilities useful for those research groups which needs to initially organize and store their geospatial data according to RITMARE SDI requirements, for both technical and data policy aspects. These modules provide contents that could be easy accessed through (1) a dedicated website for the technological enablement toolkit (GET-IT software) developed in RITMARE and (2) the RITMARE Wiki platform. The latter provides basic and intermediate educational contents which are available through: 1.45 items glossary; 2.24 items FAQs section; 3.2 different webcasts, specifically dedicated to RITMARE Spatial Data Infrastructure and GET-IT software; 4.GET-IT software documentation to meet the different research group member's needs. 2.the supporting (3) module consists of a technological assistance service for more advanced research groups which already share their research data in a RITMARE-compliant way, even if they still need to be supported according to some specific issues. This supporting module consists of a taskforce permanently dedicated to collect requests and to accomplish the technological enablement of research groups. The taskforce consists of a unique contact point (mail) through which the RITMARE Data Team receives, tracks and provides technical solutions to assist different research groups requests. Moreover the taskforce is starting to implement onsite meeting for addressing specific topic identified by the research group. Thanks to the supporting module, new assistance requests were addressed by achieving: 1.Type 1 technological support (Installing and assisting new RITMARE SDI nodes) 2.Type 2 technological support (External nodes enablement) 3.Type 3 technological support (Data transfer to RITMARE SDI nodes) 4.Type 4 technological support (Data connection to RITMARE SDI nodes) RITMARE Helpdesk represents an important component of RITMARE SDI in order to make effectively sustainable the data infrastructure as well as the data lifecycle of every research group, fostering data's chance to be found, accessed, reused and easily integrated with data belonging to other domains.