LifeWatch Italy: the Italian hub for open and FAIR research data

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness among researchers about the immense value of sharing their data with the wider scientific community. However, it is important to note that this shift towards data sharing is relatively recent, and a substantial amount of valuable research data continues to languish on researchers' hard drives. These happens when research findings have been formally published in academic papers, yet the associated data, which could potentially fuel further discoveries, remain largely hidden and inaccessible. The challenge now is not only to foster a culture of data sharing but also to systematically unearth and curate these hidden data treasures, ensuring that they contribute to the broader advancement of knowledge. Here, we introduce LifeWatch Italy, a research Consortium of 36 national Institutions led by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) that is deeply engaged on the biodiversity and ecosystem data mobilization process from the scientific community of practice. LifeWatch Italy is the Italian node of the European Research Infrastructure Consortium, LifeWatch ERIC, the distributed e-Science Infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research. The main aim of LifeWatch Italy is to develop and maintain digital solutions for FAIR and Open management of research products and associated metadata. This includes platforms and services for the collection, integration, analysis, modeling, publication and access to data and related services, ensuring technical and semantic interoperability through controlled vocabularies and ontologies. The new LifeWatch Italy Metadata catalogue will allow the import of any metadata schema, automates the mapping among metadata fields, and allows human and machine-readability/actionability by providing RDF/JSON format file. Additionally, the new LifeWatch Italy DataPortal assigns a DOI to datasets, allows the semantic annotation of variables, permits semi-automatic metadata compilation and storage, and ensures reusability by attaching an open data license (CC-BY). Our aspiration is to become the centralized repository for housing all data and associated metadata originating from the Italian biodiversity and ecosystem scientific community. In our efforts to promote this initiative, we actively participate in numerous projects that require the mobilization of data generated in the past. While our endeavours have been underpinned by a state-of-the-art data hub, we have come to acknowledge that the process of data mobilization from the past has not been as effective as initially envisaged. Despite our advanced infrastructure, the challenges related to historical data integration persist, prompting us to explore various solutions aimed at enhancing this critical aspect. This issue is further compounded by the fact that data related to biodiversity data typically exhibit significant diversity. The diversity of parameters collected, and the varying methodologies employed by researchers from different backgrounds have hindered the smooth and effective mobilization of data from the scientific community to data repositories. The developments realised by LifeWatch Italy represent a model for organizing and facilitating future data mobilization activities in multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder projects. Our aim is to increase the volume of FAIRified data, contributing to addressing significant societal challenges associated with climate change, resource efficiency, food security, agriculture, sustainable development, energy, and health.