Report on Community Conversation #1: enhancing discoverability & access to data

This report summarises the first Community Conversation on improving data discoverability and access, which focused on spatial data and the Land Cover Map. The conversation took place during an online workshop held by UKCEH on 6 May 2025. This Community Conversation is part of our co-design approach to the Digital and Data Integration work package (WP2) in the National Capability for UK (NC-UK) challenges programme. The event attracted over 90 attendees (70 from outside UKCEH) including researchers, policy professionals, students, and data users. The workshop introduced recent updates to the Environmental Information Data Centre EIDC Catalogue to improve data access, as well as opportunities to enhance the underlying metadata. The Land Cover Map (LCM) datasets were showcased, along with a new Spatial Data Explorer (Beta) tool that will be launched soon with LCM 2024 datasets and expanded to include more datasets. Also, early ideas for using AI tools like Semantic Search and Large Language Models (LLM) to enhance discoverability were explored. Panel discussions and participant feedback will help shape future improvements to the EIDC, LCM tools, and community co-design efforts.