2026-12-07, 17:00–18:00 (Europe/Athens), Basement (Foyer)
The SoilWise Project, a Horizon Europe Mission Soil project (2023–2027), builds an open-access catalogue that harvests soil metadata from across Europe and makes it discoverable through a search interface (the SoilWise Finder) and an AI chatbot (the Soil Companion), which will later be part of the European Soil Observatory (EUSO). Yet what surfaces in SoilWise, and how well, depends on the publishing choices data and knowledge providers make. We illustrate how metadata records go through the SoilWise pipeline, so that data and knowledge providers understand how they can make their work FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
Starting from publication on Zenodo with a DOI and a grant-agreement number, the record is picked up automatically by the SoilWise Harvester via OpenAIRE. It is then harmonised from its source format into a common SoilWise data model and deduplicated against records from other aggregators such as the INSPIRE Geoportal and data.europa.eu. A validation step scores the record for completeness and INSPIRE compliance, while an augmentation step enriches it with standardised SoilVoc concept identifiers, normalised resource types, and geographic information extracted from text where explicit spatial metadata is missing. The processed metadata record is stored across three parallel structures, each supporting a different mode of access: a relational database, a semantic Knowledge Graph, and a full-text search index. Finally, the record becomes discoverable both through the SoilWise Finder's faceted search interface and through the Soil Companion, an AI assistant that uses retrieval-augmented generation to synthesise natural-language answers from across the catalogue.
At every stage, the concrete publishing decision that determines whether a metadata record succeeds is highlighted: a DOI and grant reference for harvesting, a recognised metadata standard for harmonisation, complete core fields for validation, and controlled-vocabulary keywords and geographic extent for augmentation and search. This work is aimed at Mission Soil data managers, data stewards, researchers, and Living Lab participants, with the practical message that understanding the pipeline is what enables soil data and knowledge providers to make their work findable today and preserved in EUSO at the JRC.
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.