LUMEN (Linked User-driven Multidisciplinary Exploration Network) had its official launch in Brussels on 20 and 21 January 2025, offering a first glimpse of the ambitious vision of the European Commission-funded project to revolutionise interdisciplinary collaboration across four scientific disciplines.
The LUMEN project (Linked User-driven Multidisciplinary Exploration Network) officially got under way in Brussels on 20 and 21 January 2025, marking the beginning of an ambitious initiative funded by the European Commission. At the inaugural event, representatives from 20 partner organisations across 10 countries gathered to outline the project’s vision, which aims to revolutionise interdisciplinary collaboration across four scientific disciplines.
With funding of approximately €7 million, LUMEN aims to accelerate cooperation between mathematics (Maths), social sciences and humanities (SSH), earth system science (ES) and molecular dynamics (MD). Running from January 2025 to December 2027 and coordinated by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the project will expand and enhance existing research platforms.
More specifically, LUMEN will extend the capabilities of GoTriple (for SSH) and Centre Mersenne (for mathematics), while simultaneously developing new platforms for the other scientific domains. Built on a white-label version of the GoTriple platform, the project will create an interoperable ecosystem that facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration through advanced tools and features tailored to researchers’ needs.
LUMEN also positions itself as a key pillar in strengthening the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), contributing to expanding the portfolio of services offered by the European open science ecosystem. Through innovative solutions for data discovery and scientific collaboration, the project will help research communities explore and share knowledge more effectively.
Within LUMEN, Net7’s primary role is to re-engineer the software components of the GoTriple platform to create a white-label Discovery Platform, adaptable across the different research domains involved in the project — in particular those of the scientific communities participating in LUMEN (Social Sciences and Humanities, Earth Sciences and Molecular Dynamics). Data processing pipelines will be improved to enhance the quality and FAIR support of automatically imported metadata. New advanced services will then be developed — including an AI-powered chatbot to strengthen discovery capabilities — alongside new visualisation tools. The EOSC ecosystem will be extended with new domain-specific discovery platforms and with advanced Data Mesh-based integration features for existing ones. Finally, a dedicated service will be created to help Data Providers improve the quality and FAIR compliance of their metadata.
Net7 will also play an active role across all other technical work packages and in the co-design of the User Interface.
Suzanne Dumouchel, the project’s scientific coordinator, underlines the significance of the initiative:
“At its heart, LUMEN is a truly interdisciplinary vision of cross-domain collaboration throughout the entire research cycle. But more than that, LUMEN outcomes will increase the impact of research and improve collaboration among different scientific domains and, more importantly, it will enhance discovery experiences and deep explorations of data thanks to different innovative features tailored to communities’ needs. Fostering the principles of Open Science, LUMEN will help build trust in European scientific communities while strengthening the EOSC federation.”
