A science and user community to achieve the vision, and get there faster

The Integrated Modelling Partnership is a strategic initiative of the Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3), which brings together institutions contributing to designing and building a fully integrated information landscape for the science of the future. IM Partnership collaborators are dedicated to a common vision of an open-source, open-data, FAIR implementation of the semantic web, and a path to achieve it. This includes the software and computational infrastructure to allow more powerful predictive modeling, better reuse of scientific data, and better decision making for society.

Institutional collaborators participate directly in building the vision, knowledge, and tools to support a more efficient, integrated, and democratic scientific process. The four areas of operation of the partnership are: Semantics, Open Data, Open Models, and Software Infrastructure to support transparent application of the FAIR principles for automated modeling.

The Integrated Modelling Partnership offers:

  • High-level collaborations: collaborators design their applications in coordination with the core staff at BC3 providing know-how and support, participating in defining the immediate development needs and influencing the prioritization of tasks. Through specific Work Packages (WPs), higher-standing collaborators drive the development of large initiatives in the four areas of operation listed above.
  • Defining strategic directions: each institutional collaborator can nominate a steering committee member. The steering committee re-evaluates the activities, governance structure and directions of development, collaboratively setting directions of development for the following years.

All the products developed by the IM Partnership (worldview, software stack, data and models, online courses) bear no cost for non-profit use. However, their access is regulated through an end-user license agreement (EULA), which is necessary to obtain a valid IM certificate at https://integratedmodelling.org/hub. Four types of EULAs are available, which discriminate between individual vs. corporate and non-profit vs. for-profit users. The EULAs regulate the access and use of the k.LAB System hosted in the BC3 Infrastructure, including the semantic web of data, models powered by the k.LAB Software and other data and resources made available to the user through the BC3 Infrastructure. In addition and outside the EULA, any user may obtain an open source license of the k.LAB Software under the terms of the Affero General Public License 3.0 or any higher version through the website integratedmodelling.org, which will allow to exploit the k.LAB Software under the terms of that license.

Key development targets over the next three years include: 1) polished web and IDE interfaces, 2) workable semantics to link (certain) key interdisciplinary integrative models, 3) working examples of (certain) key interdisciplinary integrative models, taking advantage of machine learning and data-intensive science, and 4) an editor and guidelines on creating branded “palettes” for specific problems/contexts, for tailored products to distribute to their target users.