When Excel is not enough

"You can't do research with large amounts of data using Excel sheets anymore"; Rossi cuts to the point: "It doesn't matter what computer language you use - you choose it according to the result you want to achieve, but there is one certainty: you will have to organize the large amounts of data in appropriate programs. At my university, in Würzburg, I was pushed towards data sciences, but in general, universities are struggling".
"Certainly, there is still a need for Open-Source literacy and it is a generational issue, but even those who are less familiar with these tools should have the vision and be able to understand the potential,' says Genova. "It's been a while since Open Source has been the victor".
For the majority of people over 35, Open Science has the same effect that fax machines did on my grandmother. We are grateful for open software, which can be modified, enriched or corrected by anyone who knows how because it gives us access to a lot of useful information – just think of Wikipedia, or the interactive portals we use for consulting election results or the progress of the pandemic – but we do not really understand how it works.
The first ideological battles against proprietary software, i.e. software that is paid for and cannot be customized except at a very high price by software companies such as Microsoft or Adobe, date back to the 1980s and were carried out by only a handful of computer professionals. Genova defines them as "kind of hippies", and looking at the long hair and beard of Richard Stallman, one of the earliest US activists, he has a point. (And you do not even have to listen to the song Stallman wrote as an ode to free software).
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then: today, for those who create a piece of code to better manage the results of experiments in a biomedical laboratory or the data of engineering tests, the hippy essence has faded. In fact, even the nerd veneer is disappearing. Innovation is simply becoming something normal.

"Here's the link to my code, if you want to work on it, get busy". That's how Rossi replied to Genova the first time he contacted him. And he, Genova, got busy indeed.
For his PhD thesis, Rossi had worked with meteorological data made available in open-source mode by the Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano. Rossi had sorted the results out for his own needs. Genova found out and looked at the work, but in his opinion the data representation was still complex: "It was ok for professionals, but you couldn't consult the information intuitively". So, when he received the code he started testing. He was not an expert in R – a software born for mainly statistical purposes that today is also used more generally to visualize search results in databases – but he studied and watched hours and hours of online tutorials.
After all, it's a virtuous circle. "Now that even the big computer companies are offering Open-Source software, there are more and more opportunities to learn and experiment," Rossi points out. "And with Open Source, you collaborate better, faster”.
After a few months and countless exchanges of messages, the two scientists that did not know each other beforehand completed the Meteobrowser. In the middle of the screen is an interactive map: to read the data, you can click on the icons that indicate the measuring stations, but you can also select a geographical area; moreover, you can choose the time interval that you prefer. Any user can do this intuitively. And the web analytics confirm this.
Online since August 2019, the site has received over 6,000 visits and many users have contacted the two researchers since. "Colleagues use the platform to plan their measurement campaigns, geologists and snowmaking companies have written to us, and even professionals we would never have thought our data could be useful to, such as the managers of a salami producer, have reached out," recalls Genova. "You really do collaborate better if you share," reiterates Rossi.