SKA-Link: How could the SKA become a reference in Scientific Methodology?

The main challenge of Radio Astronomy for the next decade will be to build the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). This instrument, with the potential to provide revolutionary science in astrophysics, physics and astrobiology, will be, once complete, the largest scientific infrastructure on Earth, with antennas spread across several thousand of kilometres in two continents (Africa and Australia). These antennas will generate exa-bytes of data that should be processed and transformed into science data products, so that scientists can work with them.
It is hence easy to imagine the huge technological challenge that building this instrument entails. The SKA data volumes will reach the exa-scale and will take computing, networking and storage resources to their limits. However, the biggest challenge will be scientific. We will not be able to extract scientific knowledge from such amount of data with our current practices. Even more important: in the age in which Science is undergoing a reproducibility crisis, SKA should become a reference not only in science and technology but also in Scientific Methodology. The ambition of SKA-Link project is to contribute to this.
In this talk, we present SKA-Link: combining knowledge to pioneer Big-Data solutions for SKA Data Centres, a project funded by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and coordinated by the AMIGA group from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC, Granada). In this project, experts on e-Science technologies and the responsible of designing the SKA Data Centres have gathered together to elaborate a general framework of Best Practices that assist the SKA community to successfully exploit the immense flow of SKA data, with an emphasis on tools that facilitate the reproducibility of the scientific methods and their verification.