2026-06-08 –, Frannz Salon
A brief look at how scientific data came under political pressure during the presidency of Donald Trump, and how scientists and data repositories in Europe worked to protect public access to evidence-based research, ensuring access for data science in a well-structured way.
What happens when the data that is used by climate research, public health, and civil rights enforcement becomes politically inconvenient? This talk examines the vulnerability of scientific data during the presidency of Donald Trump, a period marked by the removal of government web pages, restrictions on agency communications, and proposed budget cuts to research institutions.
The talk highlights the role of PANGAEA – Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science in ensuring long-term preservation and open access to geoscientific datasets, demonstrating how trusted repositories can safeguard publicly funded research and make it globally accessible despite shifting political climates. By assigning persistent identifiers (DOIs), rich metadata, use of terminologies, standardized formats, and open licenses, data gets FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — and readily integrable into computational and AI workflows, enabling large-scale analysis, machine learning applications, and reproducible science across disciplines.
Uwe is committer and PMC member of Apache Lucene and Apache Solr. His main focus is on development of Lucene Core. He implemented fast numerical search and is maintaining the new attribute-based text analysis API. He studied Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and works as managing director for SD DataSolutions GmbH in Bremen, Germany, a company that provides consulting and support for Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch, and Apache Solr. He also works for “PANGAEA – Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data” where he implemented the portal’s geo-spatial retrieval functions with Lucene Java. Uwe had talks about Lucene at various international conferences like the previous Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon EU/US, Lucene Revolution, Lucene Eurocon, and various local meetups.