MaRESS
MaRESS (Mapping Research in Earth System Science) is a web platform developed as part of the NFDI4Earth Incubator Lab for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing research metadata in the Earth system sciences. It provides interactive map and graph interfaces that make research outputs discoverable and interconnected.
Motivation
Earth system science produces vast amounts of research output, publications, datasets, models, and field campaigns, that are difficult to discover and contextualize. Traditional literature search yields flat lists; MaRESS instead provides spatial and network-based exploration:
- Where has research been conducted? (Geographic visualization)
- How are research groups and topics connected? (Knowledge graph)
- What datasets and methods are being used? (Metadata exploration)
Architecture
The platform is built as a full-stack web application:
- Frontend: Vue 3 with OpenLayers for interactive maps and Cytoscape.js for graph visualization
- Backend: FastAPI providing REST APIs for metadata queries
- Database: PostgreSQL with PostGIS for spatial queries
- NLP pipeline: Natural language processing for extracting geographic and thematic metadata from publication abstracts
Related stack notes
Connection to FAIR principles
MaRESS operationalizes the FAIR principles by making research metadata more findable (geographic and thematic search), accessible (open web interface), interoperable (standardized metadata schemas), and reusable (API access to structured metadata).
The platform was developed in the context of NFDI4Earth, the German National Research Data Infrastructure for Earth system sciences, which aims to improve research data management across the discipline.
See also: FAIR, Metadata, Knowledge graph, Machine-actionable Knowledge for Earth Science, MOC Open Science Data and Knowledge Graphs, MOC Web Development and Application Architecture