TCS NFO Consortium

Chair

Gaetano Festa

Consortium governance and coordination

INGV (Italy)

Organizations in the consortium

• INGV (Italy)
• Università di Napoli Federico II (Italy)
• IMO (Iceland)
• Swiss Seismological Service at ETHZ (Switzerland)
• KOERI (Turkey)
• INCDFP RA (Romania)
• NOA (Greece)
• CNRS (France)
• NKUA (Greece)
• UPATRAS (Greece)

Governance & Legal

Following the EPOS functional architecture, NFO is one of the Thematic Core Services (TCS), a community-specific integration level. The TCS represent transnational governance frameworks where data and services are provided to answer scientific questions and where each community discusses their specific implementation, best practices and sustainability strategies as well as legal and ethical issues.

EPOS initiative aims to implement integrated services not only from the technical point of view but also from the legal, governance and financial one. Accordingly, the NFO community agreed on a set of common rules and procedures to be used as a reference frame. These guidelines compose the Consortium Agreement (CA) that so far, the legal entities (Research Institutions) behind the six NFOs, have formally signed in 2020, with the objective to harmonize and coordinate the community intended as EPOS service providers and data suppliers, as well as to work together to ensure the long-term sustainability of the initiative.

The NFOs contributing to the TCS are either operated by a single National organization or by different National and European organizations. The complexities beyond National Research Infrastructures (NRIs) are managed at the NFOs level. TCS service providers formalized their intention about the full adoption of the EPOS data policy and the permit of distributing their own data and products through the EPOS services, on behalf of the data owners (Suppliers).

Coordination & Strategic activities

NFO Community constantly works to ensure the long-term sustainability of the data access provision guaranteeing an easy discovery and access to data and services. New communication channels and strategies are pursued to establish enhanced interactions with the whole NFO community and to coordinate the needed activities to provide existing services and implementing new ones.

The NFO community is also posing efforts to strengthen collaborations with other related EU and global initiatives dedicated to the monitoring and multidisciplinary study of active fault zones (such as the GEO Geohazards Supersites initiative).

Building a single and distributed network of multi-parameter observatories with common instrumental and monitoring standards, common protocols for observations and analysis and common data access and distribution channels is the main road. Each participating or new NFO will be a node in this distributed network, and users will be able to access all or any of the participating NFOs through the ICS and TCS services, enabling research on the genesis of earthquakes. Upon this task, there is the continuous need to coordinate all developments for multidisciplinary innovative data and metadata standardization and harmonization.

The NFO TCS will assist new NFO in their design, installation and inclusion in EPOS, and promote the development of new technologies and methodologies for near-fault observations. All nodes will adopt best practices for multidisciplinary data provision, guarantee data preservation and curation of continuous and standardized high-resolution multidisciplinary near-fault data, engage to develop, install and operate new instrumental observation systems (e.g., strain- and tilt-meter; electro-magneto-telluric instruments, geochemical monitoring stations, fiber optic cables).