2026-12-09, 16:15–16:30 (Europe/Athens), Amphitheater I
SoilWise is a Horizon Europe Mission Soil project (2023–2027) building an open-access catalogue that brings together soil-related datasets, publications, software, and knowledge currently scattered across hundreds of European repositories, project websites, and aggregators. Rather than hosting data itself, SoilWise indexes metadata about resources held elsewhere and links back to the original sources, providing a single discovery layer that respects the autonomy of existing data providers.
This talk presents the platform by following the journey of a single soil metadata record from publication to use. Tracing one record through the system, we show how it is harvested from major European aggregators such as OpenAIRE and CORDIS; harmonised from its original format into a single common model; validated for completeness and INSPIRE compliance; augmented with standardised vocabulary concepts, multilingual labels, and link checks; and stored across a relational database, a knowledge graph, and a search index. The journey ends at the two user-facing tools: the SoilWise Finder, a search-and-browse catalogue, and the Soil Companion, a soil-domain chatbot that grounds its natural-language answers in catalogue records and links back to its sources.
This single narrative gives the audience a clear mental model of how heterogeneous, fragmented soil metadata is made coherently searchable across Europe — and where the FAIR principles work well in practice and where systemic gaps remain. The talk also looks ahead: the SoilWise Catalogue is designed to feed directly into the European Soil Observatory (EUSO) at the Joint Research Centre, which is foreseen to host and operate the platform beyond the project's lifetime, keeping the discovery layer growing as part of the European soil-observation ecosystem.
The talk is aimed at a broad audience, researchers, policy makers, Mission Soil participants, and JRC/EUSO stakeholders, interested in how European soil knowledge can be brought together and kept findable.
Dr. Radu Giurgiu is a researcher at ILVO, the Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and the project coordinator of SoilWise, a Horizon Europe project funded under the EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe”. He has a background in agronomy and holds a PhD in plant science.
Within his team at ILVO, Radu works at the intersection of climate, soil, and digital innovation, focusing on how data-driven tools and user-centred services can support the transition towards healthier and more resilient soils in Flanders and across Europe. Through SoilWise, he coordinates efforts to build a European Soil Health Data Space and to make FAIR soil data more accessible and useful for science, policy, and practice. The outputs of SoilWise are expected to be integrated into the European Soil Observatory (EUSO) and further developed and maintained by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, supporting the long-term sustainability and impact of the initiative.
Dr. Wannes De Man works as a researcher at the Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), where he contributes to and coordinates Horizon Europe projects on data-driven innovation in the agri-food sector. He has a background in food science, NMR spectroscopy, and international project management, and holds a PhD in Bioscience Engineering.
Within his team at ILVO, Wannes works at the intersection of climate, soil, and digital innovation, focusing on how data-driven tools and user-centred services can support the transition towards more sustainable agrifood systems in Flanders and across Europe. Through the SoilWise project, he coordinates efforts to build a European Soil Health Data Space and to make FAIR soil data more accessible and useful for science, policy, and practice.