Lumen project: scientific data platforms

Officially launched in January 2025, it is led by the Direction des Données Ouvertes de la Recherche (DDOR), with the participation of members of CNRS Earth & Universe, CNRS Biology and Insmi in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Discover the beginnings and details of this project with Suzanne Dumouchel, head of international cooperation at DDOR and member of theEOSC board of directors, Violaine Louvet, scientific delegate in charge of data and scientific computing atInsmi, Evelyne Miot, director of Mathdoc, and Sandrine Layrisse, scientific delegate in charge of digital tools at Insmi and director of the Mathrice network.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to federate infrastructures for disseminating scientific production at European level. The aim is to make it easy to find all available scientific production. According to Violaine Louvet, “ some disciplines are already well represented, as they are already highly structured and present at European level (energy physics, universal sciences, etc.). Others are less well represented, such as mathematics, because the needs are not the same. We'd been trying to get involved for some time, but we weren't sufficiently visible to run a project ourselves: LUMEN is an opportunity to join a project with solid foundations and to become part of this European initiative “.

Open science

Part of the open science movement, the LUMEN project is a multi-disciplinary project supported by CNRS at EOSC. The aim is to develop platforms that bring together different scientific disciplines. Suzanne Dumouchel explains: “ Thanks to the EOSC working groups, we have created synergies between several CNRS disciplines, and got to know each other better by exchanging information on our practices and needs. And that's how the idea of working together on a European project came about, and how I came to coordinate the preparation of the project.

Sandrine Layrisse, Violaine Louvet and Evelyne Miot then joined the adventure by participating in the Innovative and customizable services for EOSC Exchanges call for projects in October 2023. “ DDOR wanted to coordinate a project around data “discovery” platforms ,” explains Mathdoc director Evelyne Miot . “ Mainly around GoTriple, but including other scientific communities: mathematics, molecular dynamics, and earth system, i.e. nearly twenty other European partners. We have also added a natural European partner: zbMATH OPEN, the largest open-access bibliographic database for maths”. Coordination work, discussions on the project objectives and the drafting of the project document began in December and continued until March, with regular meetings.

Scientific data platforms for all researchers

Interdisciplinarity is a central aspect of the LUMEN project and, according to Suzanne Dumouchel, "of all the project's innovation compared with what is being done elsewhere. We've identified similar needs in terms of services, but with varied resources that really depend on the disciplines involved. Based on two existing platforms: GoTriple for the humanities and social sciences and the Mersenne center for mathematics, it was decided to reinforce the developments of these platforms and create two new ones for molecular dynamics and the Earth system.”

“ With a multi-disciplinary approach to scientific data”, adds Violaine Louvet, ” we would like to add advanced functionalities, in particular those involving artificial intelligence tools. This would make it possible to have a kind of connection between the various scientific results and other articles, people's profiles or software to facilitate the possibility of discovering data and enabling researchers to go further in their work. The idea is not really to duplicate data, but rather to direct people to where it is “.

A project inspired by advanced scientific data search tools

The LUMEN project benefits from what has already been achieved in advanced scientific data search tools. “ What we bring to the table ,” notes Violaine Louvet, ” is everything that's been done at the Mersenne Center. “ More specifically, “ adds Evelyne Miot, ‘ the first objective is to integrate Mathrice ’s PLMLatex tool , which enables collaborative writing of articles in LaTeX format, into the Mersenne center's editorial chain. In particular, this will enable authors of the Mersenne Center's journals to submit their articles and exchange information directly with the Mersenne Center's LaTeX layout team via the interface.

“The second objective is to improve the links between Mersenne publications and the codes or software associated with them, by providing links to entries for these codes and software in catalogs such as that developed as part of LUMEN, or in zbMATH OPEN 's swMATH software description database , and deposited in trusted repositories such as SoftwareHeritage. In this way, we will improve interoperability between publications and codes, which is starting to become an important issue for the mathematical community ”.

Suzanne Dumouchel adds: “ We started from the principle that it would be better to have several platforms dedicated to their scientific community but capable of interacting with each other, rather than a single platform that would be a catch-all and reduce the complexity of each discipline's data. We remain in the field of research, where data quality is paramount “.

Exciting, unifying challenges

Violaine Louvet is enthusiastic about the project: "The link with software, which is also very much in demand in the human and social sciences and relevant on a European scale, is very interesting. There's a lot of work going on around the construction of discovery graphs, links between different products, semantic aspects, metadata issues, and the integration of notebooks into this vision.”

“Finding common needs and objectives with the other disciplines involved in the project, which really make sense to our community (regardless of their geographical origin) was the most difficult part of the project, and gave rise to numerous meetings in groups and sub-groups ”, confides Evelyne Miot. The large number of different partners, disciplines and uses sometimes complicated the exchanges, the challenge of which was to “ identify commonalities without erasing differences ”, adds Suzanne Dumouchel.

What's next for the project?

Officially launched in January 2025, the project team is planning specific actions and workshops for mathematicians. The aim is to help the community get to know the tool and make it their own by the end of the project. “ We'll be taking part in the project's interdisciplinary working groups ,” says Evelyne Miot. “As soon as the tool is available at the Mersenne center, we will inform the journals and deploy it for those who wish to do so, and we will present the tool at events linked to the Mersenne center and Mathrice “.

Violaine Louvet concludes: “ After 36 months, we'll have an operational prototype. After that, I hope we'll go much further. Some things will be completed, and others will be at an intermediate stage at the end of the 36 months .