About Datalakes

Developer: James Runnalls

Principle Investigators: Damien Bouffard & Jonas Šukys

Remote Sensing: Daniel Odermatt

This project is a collaboration between Eawag and the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)

Predicting the evolution of freshwater systems is the impetus of many limnologists. Technological developments have opened countless ways to investigate these systems, with the drawback that scientists are today overwhelmed by data. Efficiently utilizing the benefits of present-day data and technology requires optimizing the way data is shared and reused. The means of acquisition and computational processing of third-party data are often non transparent, and hence irreproducible after the end of the project’s timeframe.

With the recent development of an operational interdisciplinary in-situ floating laboratory (LéXPLORE, https://lexplore.info/) on Lake Geneva, we identified the need for a user-friendly web based open access data platform to foster scientific data exchange: https://www.datalakes-eawag.ch/. The main objective was to provide a fully open access sensor-to-front end platform for scientific data in Swiss lakes. The Datalakes platform incorporates continuous in-situ acquisition, storage, curation, patching, visualization, and extraction frameworks of environmental data and model output, together with an accessible online interface for visualization of historical data, future predictions, and user-friendly online data extraction.

We invite interested scientists to use Datalakes, and to visualize and download our initial datasets. We also welcome feedback and the inclusion of new data, products or models that will be of use to the Swiss freshwater community via this newly developed open access data infrastructure.