LUMEN Voices: Foxcub – Julien Homo
In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we’ll 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, Julien Homo answered our questions.
- Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
Foxcub is a French SME specialised in data architecture and semantic technologies. In LUMEN, it leads the technical coordination, designs the Data Mesh architecture and metamodel, develops the Interdisciplinary Metasearch and the Semantic FAIR platform, ensuring coherence across key components.
- What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
Designing the LUMEN Data Mesh framework and leading the development of the Interdisciplinary Metasearch Service are the most exciting parts of our contribution. By introducing concrete mechanisms such as Data Contracts and FAIR-by-design exposure rules, we help communities federate their platforms while preserving their autonomy — paving the way for a sustainable, interoperable, and scalable ecosystem.
- LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is conducted?
By breaking down technical and organizational barriers between disciplines, LUMEN enables researchers to discover, access, and reuse resources beyond their own domain. This fosters new synergies, accelerates scientific insights, encourages serendipitous discoveries, and supports the emergence of truly interdisciplinary research workflows.
4.Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
By 2027, we hope LUMEN will have laid the foundations for a federated and sustainable ecosystem where research communities can expose, discover, and reuse data with minimal friction. The adoption of Data Mesh principles and Data Contracts should empower communities to maintain control over their data while ensuring interoperability at scale.
