Quality and Trust in the European Open Science Cloud

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) has the objective to provide a virtual environment offering open and seamless services for the re-use of research data across borders and scientific disciplines. This ambitious vision sets significant challenges that the research community must meet if the benefits of EOSC are to be realised. One of those challenges, which has both technical and cultural aspects, is to determine the “Rules of Participation” that enable users to assess the quality of the data and services provided through EOSC and thereby enable them to trust the data and services they access. This paper discusses some issues relevant to determining the Rules of Participation that will enable EOSC to meet these objectives. &nbsp

Component Composition in Business and System Modelling

Bespoke development of large business systems can be couched in terms of the composition of components, which are, put simply, chunks of development work. Design, mapping a specification to an implementation, can also be expressed in terms of components: a refinement comprising an abstract component, a concrete component and a mapping between them. Similarly, system extension is the composition of an existing component, the legacy system, with a new component, the extension. This paper overviews work being done on a UK EPSRC funded research project formulating and formalizing techniques for describing, composing and performing integrity checks on components. Although the paper focuses on the specification and development of information systems, the techniques are equally applicable to the modeling and re-engineering of businesses, where no computer system may be involved

Fostering global data sharing: Highlighting the recommendations of the Research Data Alliance COVID-19 working group

© 2020 Austin CC et al. The systemic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic require cross-disciplinary collaboration in a global and timely fashion. Such collaboration needs open research practices and the sharing of research outputs, such as data and code, thereby facilitating research and research reproducibility and timely collaboration beyond borders. The Research Data Alliance COVID-19 Working Group recently published a set of recommendations and guidelines on data sharing and related best practices for COVID-19 research. These guidelines include recommendations for researchers, policymakers, funders, publishers and infrastructure providers from the perspective of different domains (Clinical Medicine, Omics, Epidemiology, Social Sciences, Community Participation, Indigenous Peoples, Research Software, Legal and Ethical Considerations). Several overarching themes have emerged from this document such as the need to balance the creation of data adherent to FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable), with the need for quick data release; the use of trustworthy research data repositories; the use of well-annotated data with meaningful metadata; and practices of documenting methods and software. The resulting document marks an unprecedented cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and cross-jurisdictional effort authored by over 160 experts from around the globe. This letter summarises key points of the Recommendations and Guidelines, highlights the relevant findings, shines a spotlight on the process, and suggests how these developments can be leveraged by the wider scientific community

A Real-time Action Logic of Objects

This paper presents work performed in the EPSRC ''Object-oriented Specification of Reactive and Real-time Systems'' project. It aims to extend the Object Calculus of Fiadeira and Mailbaum to cover durative actions and real-time constraints. We define a core logic, termed ''Real-time action logic'' (RAL) which can provide an axiomatic semantics and reasoning framework for concurrent, real-time and object-oriented specification languages. The logic could also be viewed as providing the basis of a specification language in its own right. We show how a model action logic (MAL) and real-time logic (RTL) for reasoning about concurrent object-oriented pograms and specifications can be derived from RAL, and indicate how this formalism can be used to provide an axiomatic semantics for a large part of the object-oriented specification language VDM++