Paul Taconet is an engineer at IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement), the French institute supporting the development of Southern countries through research and training.

Paul Taconet is working with the BlueBRIDGE VREs for data sharing and discovery. We asked him to tell us more about his experience with the BlueBRIDGE services.

Hello Paul, can you tell us which BlueBRIDGE services/VREs IRD is using?
We are using services for data sharing (a lot, actually) and all the data discovery and dissemination services that BlueBRIDGE offers. For instance, one VRE that we use is the Tuna Atlas VRE, which helps tuna scientists all over the world handling tuna fisheries datasets. The VRE allows to merge data coming from different sources, to easily analyze it and to better disseminate data so that researchers, policy makers and the global public can have on overview of tuna fisheries on a global scale.
Another VRE is Rstudio, which facilitate the usage of R avoiding all the issues that environment scientists might have in running R scripts locally.

What are the main challenges that VREs can help you to address?

VREs are really useful to share news on specific topics (a "Twitter for science"), to share data and processes with a given scientific community and to allow the scientists to execute them in a friendly way. VREs support a more collaborative and transparent science. During scientific working groups, for instance, they enable scientists to access the assumptions/hypothesis that have been made before processing the data and therefore replicate the experiment and understand the logic behind it.

Are VREs cost effective for an institute like IRD?
VREs make you save time, and time is money. Today data exchange and dissemination are very time consuming in research institutes, and I think that VREs can cope with this, so let’ s say: with VREs you save time, thus you save money.