Research data infrastructures in environmental sciences—Challenges and implementation approaches focusing on the integration of software components

Research data infrastructures are quickly evolving and show a wide variety, for instance in the way they address user requirements and use cases as well as how they provide user-required information through their software architecture. In this article, we discuss challenges and provide approaches to developing software architectures and software components for research data infrastructures in environmental sciences. Taking the GeoKur research project on harmonizing land use time series as the use case for curation and quality assurance of environmental research data, we designed, implemented, and tested approaches and software components with particular regard to data management planning as well as provenance and quality information management. We aim to illustrate how to better meet researchers’ needs and provide tightly interlinked software components.