In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we shine a spotlight on two of our partners—offering a glimpse into who they are, what they do, and what drives their work within LUMEN. In this edition, the e-SDF team answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
Created in 2014, e-Science Data Factory is a French R&D company aiming at proposing innovative solutions for data management to accelerate growth and progress. The company leverages its participation into European Research Infrastructure projects to provide cutting-edge services and develop innovative data management tools and architectures. The company specializes in semantic web and knowledge graph technologies coupled with AI to support the development of tailored AI solutions for Science and Industry. e-Science Data Factory contributes actively to the development of the European Open Science Cloud. In the context of LUMEN, we lead the effort of standardisation of semantic artefact development, its integration with the data sources to support the creation of a European Science Data Mesh and the integration with AI approaches with the development of the LUMIS platform.
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
The most exciting aspect of our contribution is the development of LUMIS, the LUMEN Infrastructure for Semantics. LUMIS aims at providing a standardised development workflow (similar to a CI/CD pipeline) for FAIR-by-design semantic artefacts based on the LOT methodology (and its extension LOT4FAIR) and existing open source tools and services used by the knowledge engineering community. This platform addresses a major need from the community which currently works with distributed and heterogeneous tools and services, no clear generic guidelines to standardise the semantic artefacts besides domain specific guidelines (e.g. OBO Foundry,…) and different recommendations on how to make semantic artefacts FAIR. This lack of harmonisation hampers the development of a more reliable semantic interoperability layer which is crucial for interdisciplinary collaboration. Another exciting aspect of LUMIS development is the integration of AI tools to support the design of semantic artefacts. This contribution is directly in line with our core values and our mission i.e. accelerate scientific discovery with innovative data management solutions supporting collaborative and open science.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is conducted?
LUMEN has been designed to elicit and support interdisciplinary collaboration. The development of the different platforms (i.e. White label discovery platform, Metasearch engine, LUMIS, …) aligned with the cutting edge concept of Data Mesh will provide the necessary standardised layer to support such collaboration. Furthermore, the strong embedding of semantics in these services and the aim to standardise the development of the semantic interoperability layer will play a key enabling role to support interdisciplinary alignment necessary to work at the junction of different disciplines where disruptive innovations lie.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
LUMEN has the potential to provide necessary missing services and platforms that should be instrumental in the ongoing development of the EOSC Federation. In particular, they will support the implementation of key aspects of the EOSC Interoperability Framework such as the semantic and syntactic interoperability layer and even contributes to the integration of legal and organisational interoperability by providing generic platforms that can be used by any community and with the integration of access rules and licensing with the structured framework of the Data Mesh. As the tools will be made available and easy, LUMEN will support the integration of less mature communities which do not have the skills and resources to develop their own solutions, therefore increasing the representability of these communities within the EOSC Framework.