Context
EDITO is the core infrastructure platform of the European Digital Twin Ocean. It offers tools to those building digital twins to co-create the European Digital Twin Ocean, support science-based decision making, and ensure maximum impact for marine research & innovation actions across the key objectives of the EU Mission Ocean & Waters.
The EDITO service offer is geared at enabling the marine community to contribute to the co-creation of the European Digital Twin Ocean, while sparking an innovative knowledge ecosystem that evolves and scales up to expand its reach beyond expert users, to cater to non-expert users. The ambition behind the offer is to deliver on the promise of servicing decision makers across the public and private sector, civil society, and ultimately citizens.
To respond to different service needs and expectations from users, the EDITO service offer has been structured around 3 levels of entry and interaction with the EDITO platform:
Explore: access world-class oceanographic data in one click
Create: design and run applications with your favorite tools by taking advantage of near-data computing, collaboration and build end-user apps and reproductible processes
Contribute: share your data or applications with the EDITO Community and learn about the Ocean data science with trainings and tutorials
You can watch the following video for more details:
How to join EDITO?
Registration & request for computing resources
If you are interested in EDITO and the tools it offers, we invite you to register on the platform.
Once you have registered, you will need to fill out a resources request form to use EDITO and present your plans for using the platform. You can find this form once you're logged into the Datalab with no computing resources: you'll see a banner at the top of the screen redirecting you to the form.
Our team will get back to you quickly to grant you computing resources. You can leave the default values if you are unsure what to request; you can always submit a new request to the support later.
How do you manage your account?
Once logged in to EDITO, you can access EDITO Datalab and click on “My Account” in the left-hand menu. Here is a quick overview of your EDITO account:
“Profile” section (1)
Under the “Profile” section, you will find your user ID along with the email address used for the registration.
There is also the “customizable profile” section under it. This section is very important because it allows you to:
Enter your Copernicus Marine credentials, which are required to download Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data on EDITO. If you are not a registered user of the Copernicus Marine Service, you can register on Copernicus Marine website
Connect to an HPC center via SSH without leaving EDITO, you will find more details in this article: Connect to a HPC center withtin a service or process – EDITO documentation
“Git” section (2)
The service and process deployments rely on helm chart repositories versioned using Gitlab. In this case, you will need to register on Mercator Ocean GitLab to get write access to public contribution repositories. The Mercator Ocean team will validate your request (you will receive a notification), and you will then be able to access GitLab and interact with it to contribute to EDITO.
You can configure your global Git username and email address. You can also provide a personal token to allow you to clone and push to your private GitHub or GitLab repositories without having to re-enter your credentials.
“Connect to storage” section (3)
EDITO users have access to personal S3 storage space, whose access variables are defined in the “Connect to storage” section. The storage content can be accessed in the “Explore Files” section.
📌 Note: you can programmatically access your storage outside of Datalab services by downloading (2) or copying (3) an init script in the programming language (1) of your choice:
“Vault” section (4)
Sometimes, certain pieces of information need to be made available to many applications, and they should not be directly embedded in your code (access tokens, passwords, etc.). The use of environment variables allows accessing this information from any service or process.
On the platform, these variables are treated as secrets stored in Vault (the EDITO secret management component) and are encrypted. This enables you to store tokens, credentials, and passwords securely. The My secrets page is designed like a file explorer, allowing you to sort and organize your variables into folders.
For more details, we invite you to check the following article about secret management and environment variables: Secret management – EDITO documentation
📌 Note: you can use Vault from your terminal.
“Interface preferences” section (5)
This section allows you to customize your EDITO interface:
Enable dark mode
(1)Beta-test mode
(2)The command bar
(3)that appears in certain sections (“My Services” for example)An option to reset the automatic message windows
(4)that have been requested not to be show againDesired language
(5)
How to start using the EDITO platform?
How to visualize and download data?
The EDITO MyOcean Viewer is a powerful data visualization and download interface developed to let users explore the oceanographic products available on the EDITO Catalogue by displaying the data on a map in 4 dimensions (longitude, latitude, depth, time).
EDITO MyOcean Viewer has an intuitive, detailed, easy-to-use interface. It is available on all computers and mobile devices via any web browser. You will be able to browse near-real-time data and past marine information from anywhere in the world (from the Copernicus Marine Service, the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) and other providers), download datasets, create maps, videos and gifs and share them. You can even upload your own dataset on the Viewer!
⚠️ As mentioned above; to be able to download Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data from EDITO, you will need to log in to your Copernicus Marine account. If you are not logged in to the Copernicus Marine Service when downloading data to the EDITO MyOcean Viewer, a window will pop up asking you to log in.
If you do not have an account, you can register on the Copernicus Marine website.
Features & Tools of the EDITO platform
If you have computing resources available, you can browse the EDITO Datalab and try out some of its tools! EDITO focuses on 3 levels of interaction, all backed by API and graphical web interfaces:
The services: it is an application accessible through a URL. It can be launched for a limited period (e.g. Jupyter) or permanently (e.g. What-If Scenario)
The processes: a process is a temporary operation that takes input data and transforms it into output data
The data, including metadata and assets in the EDITO data lake, composed of a data storage and data catalogue (you can interact with both using the Data API)
That’s all for the basics of EDITO. We invite you to check our documentation to learn more about the platform.
Enjoy the platform!
What's next?
On the EDITO platform, users can publish process and/or services or build services on top of existing processes (e.g. build an UI to trigger a regridding process). You can start by discovering the EDITO Data Catalogue on our Viewer!
If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions, please feel free to contact us via chat using the widget available at the bottom right of the page.