Data repository for security research and innovation

Expected Outcome:Projects’ results are expected to contribute to some or all of the following outcomes:

• Accurately gathered, stored, managed and preserved research training and testing data, disaggregated by gender if relevant, which is verified and selected in order to be realistic, up-to-date and sufficient, as well as to make research more trustworthy and reproducible;
• Researchers and projects can further increase the impact and visibility of their work by not just archiving research materials, but also opening them up for reuse and citation by other relevant actors and stakeholders;
• Properly shared and re-used relevant research data can save lives, help develop solutions and maximise the knowledge;
• Enhanced collaboration among relevant research community, improved trust between researchers and practitioners/end-users, facilitated co-operation between different research projects and reduced burden of wasted research or lost results.

Scope:The underlying idea of this topic is to avoid that security and disaster risk research projects obtain and prepare data that at the end of the projects is simply lost instead of being stored and shared for reuse.

In the security domain, due to its specificities, the special categories of data involved or/and unique limitations, which may call for additional requirements, a consolidated, common research database is particularly desired. It is of utmost importance that security practitioners are provided with an increased interoperability and improved (cross-border) exchange of data thanks to harmonised data file formats across Europe, which would easily take into account technological evolutions, i.e., be adaptable in time. Such a lack of realistic, up-to-date and sufficient training and testing data for research purposes and consequently the need for a database, data repository or any other effective and useful tool(s) to gather, manage and store varying security research data, have been regularly raised by the projects working in the area of security. The same is true of data on disaster risk management where national or regional analysis and forecasting databases or national disaster risk assessments can be fragmented or sealed without reasonable open, sustainable access to the wider community.

As a follow up of the outcomes and results of the LAGO project coming from the 2021 data topic: HORIZON-CL3-2021-FCT-01-04: Improved access to fighting crime and terrorism research data, the successful proposal, should subsequently focus on creation and deployment of a fully functional and operational common research data repository, which will extend to cover other security research areas.

The LAGO project is currently developing the skeleton of how such a repository of R&I data should be created, by providing a detailed roadmap consisting of a clear set of rules, conditions and characteristics that such a consolidated database should have. This LAGO roadmap will provide technical, legal and ethical requirements for a training and testing research data repository mostly in the area of fighting crime and terrorism, but the same project will already take into account possible applications of identified solutions in different security research domains, such as infrastructure resilience, border management or disaster resilience. The LAGO roadmap will also assess if the repository should be centralised or distributed, how to deal with "aging" data, how efficiently projects should exchange data among them taking into account security R&I specificities.

Building on the skeleton of LAGO, the newly developed data repository will enable security community (researchers, practitioners, industry, policy makers) access the scientifically satisfactory amount of up-to-date high quality and realistic data which is or was used to develop reliable (mostly digital and based on AI but also non-digital and not linked with big data) tools, technologies and solutions in support of security research and innovation. This data repository could also be very useful for verification and validation of new innovative security solutions developed under various calls in the most recent Work Programme.

Taking into account the complexity of the future repository, a multi-faceted approach will be needed and the proposal, apart from the roadmap’s findings developed by LAGO, should also build on, and not duplicate, LAGO’s outcomes regarding the following aspects:

• What exact types of data should be stored in the repository;
• Interoperability with existing operational systems;
• Interoperability/compatibility with European open science cloud (EOSC), with the TESSERA project[1] as well as other potentially relevant architectures and initiatives such as European Data Spaces or GAIA-X;
• How to search for data;
• Data models for security research - Harmonising of data formats;
• Concept of operations for the use of the repository by/during EU-funded security R&I projects, modalities of use, user profiles/schemes, etc.
• Legal issues, avoidance of any bias, accessibility levels related to the sensitivity of various data sets, solutions for annotation as well as for the aging of the data, etc.

The proposal should carry out extensive testing and evaluation (verification and validation), in close cooperation with ongoing projects, which would access the repository, populate it and use data intensively during the project implementation.

The proposal should develop an exploitation and sustainability plan following up the planning activities of LAGO, including funding instruments to be used for the operationalisation of the repository developed under the project as well as finding possibilities to maintain the repository after the lifetime of the project so that it not only continues to well function but is able to be extended with new data. The data repository will need to grow so it will have to be treated as an ongoing system. Co-ordination with already existing platforms or communities already using another reliable domain-specific data repository/ies for archiving and sharing research data is strongly recommended in order to verify if it would be possible to adhere in the future to a larger system or infrastructure of repositories such as European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for example and other relevant activities.

Adopting sound security practices, such as developing comprehensive access rules to allow only authorized users with a legitimate need to access, modify, or transmit data, are crucial. Combined with a digital signature approach or multi-factor authentication, access rules go a long way in keeping sensitive data stored in a data repository secure. These and other security measures, such as the anonymisation of personal data, will enable the research community to fully leverage large volumes of data without introducing unnecessary security risks.

The repository developed by the proposal should preserve research data relevant to various security research domains, such as fighting crime and terrorism, infrastructure resilience, border management or disaster resilience across time and help security research community easily find, access and re-use the necessary data. The development and the functioning of the repository will be based on the outcomes of the roadmap from the LAGO project[2] from 2021 FCT call project within the remits of Horizon Europe regulation (including ethics). The repository should be operational to be tested for at least one year before the project ends. Data sharing will be based on open science principle of ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable). To make data FAIR, the basics of good Research Data Management will have to be applied.

All necessary system features as well as the functioning of the repository should comply with privacy and data protection requirements when handling data, in order to facilitate data management ensuring full access to the data actually needed (in line with the necessity and proportionality principle and in full respect of fundamental rights and applicable legislation.

Projects should take into account, during their lifetime, relevant activities and initiatives for ensuring and improving the quality of scientific software and code, such as those resulting from projects funded under the topic HORIZON-INFRA-2023-EOSC-01-02 on the development of community-based approaches.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content should be addressed only if relevant in relation to the objectives of the research effort.

The project should have a maximum estimated duration of 3 years.

[1] TESSERA project: ‘Towards the datasets for the European Security Data Space for Innovation’. Internal Security Fund (ISF-2021-TF1-AG-DATA - data sets for the European Data Space for innovation). Duration: 03/2024 - 02/2026 (24 months).

[2] https://lago-europe.eu/