On Constructing Repository Infrastructures: The D-NET Software Toolkit

Due to the wide diffusion of digital repositories, organizations responsible for large research communities, such as national or project consortia, research institutions, foundations, are increasingly tempted into setting up so-called repository infrastructure systems (e.g., OAIster (http://www.oaister.org), BASE (http://www.base-search.net), DAREnet-NARCIS (http://www.narcis.info)). Such systems offer web portals, services and APIs for cross-operating over the metadata records of publications (lately also of experimental data and compound objects) aggregated from a set of repositories. Generally, they consist of two connected tiers: an aggregation system for populating an information space of metadata records by harvesting and transforming (e.g., cleaning, enriching) records from a set of OAI-PMH compatible data sources, typically repositories; and a web portal, providing end-users with advanced functionality over such information space (search, browsing, annotations, recommendations, collections, user profiling, etc). Typically, information spaces also offer access to third-party applications through standard APIs (e.g., OAI-PMH, SRW, OAI-ORE). Repository infrastructure systems address similar architectural and functional issues across several disciplines and application domains. On the one hand they all deal, with more or less contingent complexity, with the generic problem of harvesting metadata records of a given format, transform them into records of a target format and deliver web portals to operate over these records. On the other hand, they have to cope with arbitrary numbers of repositories, hence administering them, from automatic scheduling of harvesting and transformation actions, definition of relative transformation mappings, to the inherent scalability problems of coping with ever growing incoming records. Existing solutions tend to privilege customization of software, neglecting general-purpose approaches. Typically, for example, aggregation systems are designed to generate metadata records of a format X from records of format Y, and not be parametric with respect to such formats. Similarly, the participation of a repository to an infrastructure is driven by firm policies and administrators often do not have the freedom of specifying their own workflow, by combining as they prefer logical steps such as harvesting, storing, transforming, indexing and validating. In summary, repository infrastructure systems typically provide advanced and effective solutions tailored to the one scenario of interest, while can hardly be applicable to different scenarios, where similar but distinct requirements apply. As a consequence, an organization willing to set up a repository infrastructure system with peculiar requirements has to face the "expensive" problem of designing and developing a new software from scratch. In this paper, we present a general-purpose and cost-efficient solution for the construction of customized repository infrastructures, based on the D-NET Software Toolkit (www.d-net.research-infrastructures.eu), developed in the context of the DRIVER and DRIVER-II projects (http://www.driver-community.eu). D-NET offers a service-oriented framework, whose services can be combined by developers to easily construct customized aggregation systems and personalized web portals. D-NET services can be customized, extended and combined to match domain specific scenarios, while distribution, sharing and orchestration of services enables the construction of scalable and robust repository infrastructures. As we shall describe in the following, D-NET is currently the enabling software of a number of European projects and national initiatives

On Constructing Repository Infrastructures: The D-NET Software Toolkit

Due to the wide diffusion of digital repositories, organizations responsible for large research communities, such as national or project consortia, research institutions, foundations, are increasingly tempted into setting up so-called repository infrastructure systems (e.g., OAIster (http://www.oaister.org), BASE (http://www.base-search.net), DAREnet-NARCIS (http://www.narcis.info)). Such systems offer web portals, services and APIs for cross-operating over the metadata records of publications (lately also of experimental data and compound objects) aggregated from a set of repositories. Generally, they consist of two connected tiers: an aggregation system for populating an information space of metadata records by harvesting and transforming (e.g., cleaning, enriching) records from a set of OAI-PMH compatible data sources, typically repositories; and a web portal, providing end-users with advanced functionality over such information space (search, browsing, annotations, recommendations, collections, user profiling, etc). Typically, information spaces also offer access to third-party applications through standard APIs (e.g., OAI-PMH, SRW, OAI-ORE). Repository infrastructure systems address similar architectural and functional issues across several disciplines and application domains. On the one hand they all deal, with more or less contingent complexity, with the generic problem of harvesting metadata records of a given format, transform them into records of a target format and deliver web portals to operate over these records. On the other hand, they have to cope with arbitrary numbers of repositories, hence administering them, from automatic scheduling of harvesting and transformation actions, definition of relative transformation mappings, to the inherent scalability problems of coping with ever growing incoming records. Existing solutions tend to privilege customization of software, neglecting general-purpose approaches. Typically, for example, aggregation systems are designed to generate metadata records of a format X from records of format Y, and not be parametric with respect to such formats. Similarly, the participation of a repository to an infrastructure is driven by firm policies and administrators often do not have the freedom of specifying their own workflow, by combining as they prefer logical steps such as harvesting, storing, transforming, indexing and validating. In summary, repository infrastructure systems typically provide advanced and effective solutions tailored to the one scenario of interest, while can hardly be applicable to different scenarios, where similar but distinct requirements apply. As a consequence, an organization willing to set up a repository infrastructure system with peculiar requirements has to face the "expensive" problem of designing and developing a new software from scratch. In this paper, we present a general-purpose and cost-efficient solution for the construction of customized repository infrastructures, based on the D-NET Software Toolkit (www.d-net.research-infrastructures.eu), developed in the context of the DRIVER and DRIVER-II projects (http://www.driver-community.eu). D-NET offers a service-oriented framework, whose services can be combined by developers to easily construct customized aggregation systems and personalized web portals. D-NET services can be customized, extended and combined to match domain specific scenarios, while distribution, sharing and orchestration of services enables the construction of scalable and robust repository infrastructures. As we shall describe in the following, D-NET is currently the enabling software of a number of European projects and national initiatives

Profiling Attitudes for Personalized Information Provision

PAROS is a generic system under design whose goal is to offer personalization, recommendation, and other adaptation services to information providing systems. In its heart lies a rich user model able to capture several diverse aspects of user behavior, interests, preferences, and other attitudes. The user model is instantiated with profiles of users, which are obtained by analyzing and appropriately interpreting potentially arbitrary pieces of user-relevant information coming from diverse sources. These profiles are maintained by the system, updated incrementally as additional data on users becomes available, and used by a variety of information systems to adapt the functionality to the users’ characteristics

Connecting Data and Publications through e-Infrastructures

Gräf F, Hoogerwerf M, Lösch M, et al. Connecting Data and Publications through e-Infrastructures.; Accepted.The document reports results of the design, development and dissemination of “Subject-specific Pilots for Enhanced Publications” (T3.1). Being part of WP3 “Studies on practices and principles of OA”, the outcome of the task is twofold: (i) Development of three prototype applications to showcase how interconnected research information is being managed in different disciplines. (ii) Experiences and insights gained on a (potentially discipline-independent) implementation of systems capable of managing such linked artefacts that will inform the future development of the OpenAIRE infrastructure and its portal. This report is based on the paper “Linking Data and Publications: Toward a Cross-Disciplinary Approach” from the same authors. It was presented at the International Digital Curation Conference, Amsterdam 2013 and submitted to the International Journal of Digital Curation

The OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard: On blending scientific workflows and scientific publishing

First Online 30 August 2019Despite the hype, the effective implementation of Open Science is hindered by several cultural and technical barriers. Researchers embraced digital science, use “digital laboratories” (e.g. research infrastructures, thematic services) to conduct their research and publish research data, but practices and tools are still far from achieving the expectations of transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. The places where science is performed and the places where science is published are still regarded as different realms. Publishing is still a post-experimental, tedious, manual process, too often limited to articles, in some contexts semantically linked to datasets, rarely to software, generally disregarding digital representations of experiments. In this work we present the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard (RCD), designed to overcome some of these barriers for a given research community, minimizing the technical efforts and without renouncing any of the community services or practices. The RCD flanks digital laboratories of research communities with scholarly communication tools for discovering and publishing interlinked scientific products such as literature, datasets, and software. The benefits of the RCD are show-cased by means of two real-case scenarios: the European Marine Science community and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure.This work is partly funded by the OpenAIRE-Advance H2020 project (grant number: 777541; call: H2020-EINFRA-2017) and the OpenAIREConnect H2020 project (grant number: 731011; call: H2020-EINFRA-2016-1). Moreover, we would like to thank our colleagues Michele Manunta, Francesco Casu, and Claudio De Luca (Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, CNR, Italy) for their work on the EPOS infrastructure RCD; and Stephane Pesant (University of Bremen, Germany) his work on the European Marine Science RCD

D8.3 Research Impact Services: OpenAIRE 2020

This deliverable relates to the work carried out under task T8.3, “Research Impact Services”. The task’s focus is on the development of pilots with selected National funding agencies and infrastructure initiatives in order to serve them with the OpenAIRE research impact suite of services. A major service that OpenAIRE provides is the linking of research results to funding. Aside from importing the links from the repositories and journals, OpenAIRE designs, develops and enhances mining algorithms that identify and extract funding information from the text of scientific publications. With the help of NOADs we have initiated bi-lateral, often informal, collaborations with national funding agencies to facilitate mining extraction on their data. This is an on-going activity throughout the duration of the project. Currently the national funding agencies that we are working with are: FCT (Portugal), ARC (Australia), NHMRC (Australia), NSF & NIH (USA), SFI (Ireland), “Ministry of Science Education and Sport” & "Croatian Science Foundation” (Croatia), NWO (Netherlands), and DFG (Germany). This deliverable describes the nature of the data of the identified National funding agencies, as well as their export technologies, and provides the specification of the general-purpose OpenAIRE services required to support research impact measurements

Linking Data and Publications: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Approach

Hoogerwerf M, Lösch M, Schirrwagen J, et al. Linking Data and Publications: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Approach. International Journal of Digital Curation. 2013;8(1):244-254.In this paper, we tackle the challenge of linking scholarly information in multi-disciplinary research infrastructures. There is a trend towards linking publications with research data and other information, but, as it is still emerging, this is handled differently by various initiatives and disciplines. For OpenAIRE, a European cross-disciplinary publication infrastructure, this poses the challenge of supporting these heterogeneous practices. Hence, OpenAIRE wants to contribute to the development of a common approach for discipline-independent linking practices between publications, data, project information and researchers. To this end, we constructed two demonstrators to identify commonalities and differences. The results show the importance of stable and unique identifiers, and support a ‘by reference’ approach of interlinking research results. This approach allows discipline-specific research information to be managed independently in distributed systems and avoids redundant maintenance. Furthermore, it allows these disciplinary systems to manage the specialized structures of their contents themselves

Openaire2020 D6.1 - Openaire Specification And Release Plan

Manghi P, Bardi A, Atzori C, et al. Openaire2020 D6.1 - Openaire Specification And Release Plan.; 2015

OpenAIRE: Advancing open science

OpenAIRE, the point of reference for Open Access in Europe, is now addressing the problem of enabling the Open Science paradigm. To this aim it will provide services to: (i) overcome the limits of today’s scientific communication landscape, by allowing research communities and the relative e-infrastructures to fully publish, interlink, package and reuse their research artefacts (e.g. literature, data, and software) and their funding grants within the European and global ecosystem as supported/promoted by OpenAIRE, (ii) enable end-users (e.g. researchers, funder officers) to search and consult a rich and up-to-date knowledge graph of research results and (iii) enable scientific and educational information repositories and publishers to subscribe and be notified of changes in the OpenAIRE knowledge graph. These combined actions will bring long-term and immediate benefits to research communities, research organisations, repository managers, and funders by affecting the way research results are disseminated and reused. On the one hand, publishing the interlinked and packaged research literature, data and software via OpenAIRE drives research communities to an Open Science transition in a consistent and interoperable fashion. On the other hand, the resulting infrastructure concretely enables the construction of Open Science oriented services, supporting practices such as machine-assisted research reproducibility and evaluation.This research was supported by EU funded project OpenAIRE-Connect (grant agreement: 731011; Call: H2020-EINFRA-2016-1). We thank our colleague Stefania Biagioni for her help during the writing of this paper