The project will develop a pioneering digital hub which will provide easy access to an extensive range of the UK’s environmental data. Named The Digital Solutions Hub, it has been funded by the National Environment Research Council (NERC) to develop and provide access to a series of user-friendly toolkits for key decision makers across the public and private sector.
This is where the expertise of our Research IT team is invaluable. To create the hub, the team will bring together existing data from a broad range of partners, capturing information on key topics such as pollution, flooding, biodiversity, geology, carbon capture and environmental health. It will also collate economic, health and societal data from other reputable sources including the Office of National Statistics.
Involvement in this project has led to the creation of six new Research Software Engineering (RSE) roles and two new Research Infrastructure (RI) roles within Research IT. The RSEs will work closely with key stakeholders such as Defra and the NHS to convert a broad range of hub requirements into a set of tools that allow FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) access to existing and future datasets. The RSEs will be involved in all phases of the software life cycle, beginning with the requirements capture workshops and will spend time ‘embedded’ within stakeholder organisations to understand their ways of working and ensure that the resulting toolsets will be robust and accessible for all end users.
Robert Haines, Head of Research IT explained that “this is a watershed moment for Research IT; it is comfortably the biggest project that we have been involved in so far, in terms of the number of Research IT team members working on it. It’s different in the sense that we are building this Hub with, and for, industry and policy makers, as well as academics who are our more usual user community.
It could also turn out to be the most diverse project that we have worked on as well, given that it will encompass High Performance and High Throughput Computing; analysis of huge datasets with timescales ranging from the geological to real-time; and visualization and presentation of results via engaging, user-focused portals, all underpinned by world-class infrastructure. This is exactly the sort of thing we set out to achieve when we created Research IT, and it’s a great endorsement of all the talented, knowledgeable and engaged people who work here and have got us to this point.”.
This view was supported by Prof. Richard Kingston, Programme Lead for The Digital Solutions Hub who said “Unlike a normal research project where we would use RSEs to help support the development of more experimental software solutions, this programme of work is required to build a robust and fully operational hardware and software solution. The Hub will evolve into a UKRI ‘national facility’ so it has been important to work closely with Research IT throughout the development of the proposal from inception to gate-way phase. We are now recruiting a set of RSEs, Infrastructure Engineers and an Enterprise Architect to ensure we build a robust system. The RSEs are integral to the development of the Hub and will work closely with the academic team, post-docs and our external user community through a series of user workshops across the UK.”
The insights achieved by bringing this large and varied data together could help the government, local authorities, the NHS and industry to identify new opportunities and make informed decisions in key areas such as adaptations for climate change, reducing disaster risk and health and wellbeing improvements.
As well as addressing the needs of university researchers the team will also work with a variety of public and private sector stakeholders including the Environment Agency, Defra, Natural England, SEPA, Natural Resources Wales, Northern Ireland Environment Agency, Climate Northern Ireland, Health and Safety Executive, NHS Digital, Public Health agencies and the Government Actuaries Department.
The Digital Solutions programme has received £7 million funding from NERC over 4 years. Researchers will also collaborate closely with the Universities of Cardiff, Exeter, Newcastle and Southampton, plus the Turing Institute, DAFNI, and the Connected Places Catapult.
Further details on the programme can be found on the UKRI website and you can also follow them on Twitter.