D4Science is an organisation operating a
Data Infrastructure A data infrastructure is a digital infrastructure promoting data sharing and consumption.
Similarly to other infrastructures, it is a structure needed for the operation of a society as well as the services and facilities necessary for an economy t ...
offering a rich array of services by community-driven
virtual research environments.
In particular, it supports communities of practice willing to implement
open science practices.
The infrastructure follows the
system of systems System of systems is a collection of task-oriented or dedicated systems that pool their resources and capabilities together to create a new, more complex system which offers more functionality and performance than simply the sum of the constituent s ...
approach, where the constituent systems (Service providers) offer “resources” (namely services and by them data, computing, storage) assembled together to implement the overall set of D4Science services.
In particular, D4Science aggregates “domain agnostic” service providers as well as community-specific ones to build a unifying space where the aggregated resources can be exploited via Virtual research Environments and their services.
This organization is hosted by the
Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione
The "Alessandro Faedo" Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione (''Institute of Information Science and Technologies'') is an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). The institute is located in the CNR research area in ...
of
National Research Council (Italy)
The National Research Council (Italian: ''Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR'') is the largest research council in Italy. As a public organisation, its remit is to support scientific and technological research. Its headquarters are in Rome. ...
.
At the earth of this infrastructure there is an
Open Source Software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
named
gCube system.
Services
D4Science offers a rich array of services:
* ''Virtual Research Environment as a Service'' providing any
community of practice
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educat ...
with a dedicated working environment supporting any knowledge production process in a collaborative way, in fact every VRE enables
computer-supported cooperative work
Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the ...
by design. D4Science-based VREs are web-based, community-oriented, collaborative, user-friendly, open-science-enabler working environments for scientists and practitioners willing to work together to perform a set of (research) task. From the end-user perspective, each VRE manifests in a unifying web application (and a set of application programming interfaces (APIs)): (a) comprising several applications organised in specific menu items and (b) running in a plain web browser. Every application is providing VRE users with facilities implemented by relying on one or more services provisioned by diverse providers. Among the basic services every VRE is equipped with there are
** a ''Social Networking'' area enabling collaborative and open discussions on any topic and disseminating information of interest for the community, for example, the availability of a research outcome;
** a ''Workspace'' for storing, organizing and sharing any version of a research artifact, including dataset and model implementation;
** a ''User Management dashboard'' for managing membership and roles;
** a ''Catalogue Service'' recording the assets worth being published thus to make it possible for others to be informed and make use of these assets.
* ''Science Gateway as a Service'' providing a
community of practice
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educat ...
with a dedicated
science gateway hosting a selected set of
virtual research environments.
* ''Data Analytics at scale'' providing the members of a VRE with a rich array of solutions for data analytics including:
** a ''proprietary data analytics platform (DataMiner)'' to execute
analytics tasks either by relying on methods provided by the user or by others. It is endowed with importing and sharing facilities for analytics methods implemented in heterogeneous forms including
R,
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
,
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
, and
KNIME
KNIME (), the Konstanz Information Miner, is a free and open-source data analytics, reporting and integration platform. KNIME integrates various components for machine learning and data mining through its modular data pipelining "Building Blocks ...
. The platform enacts tasks execution by a distributed and hybrid computing infrastructure. Moreover, one of the worth highlighting feature of this platform is its open science-friendliness. All the analytics methods integrated in it are exposed by a standard protocol (the
OGC WPS protocol) clients can use to get informed on available methods as well as to start processes, monitor their execution and access results. Every analytics task performed by the platform automatically produces a provenance record catering for the
reproducibility of the task;
** an ''
RStudio
RStudio is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is available in two formats: RStudio Desktop is a regular desktop application while RStudio Server runs on a remote server ...
-based development environment'' for
R enabling to perform statistical computing tasks in the cloud. This RStudio environment is (i) preconfigured with libraries and packages to ease the execution of common data analytics tasks, and (ii) provides seamless access to the VRE Workspace enabling sharing of resources with other members of the same working environment.
** a ''
Jupyter
Project Jupyter () is a project with goals to develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across multiple programming languages. It was spun off from IPython in 2014 by Fernando Pérez and Brian Granger ...
-based notebook environment'' for developing and executing
interactive computing
In computer science, interactive computing refers to software which accepts input from the user as it runs.
Interactive software includes commonly used programs, such as word processors or spreadsheet applications. By comparison, non-interactive ...
by
JupyterLab instances. Each JupyterLab is (i) preconfigured with libraries and packages to ease the execution of common data analytics tasks, and (ii) provides access to the VRE Workspace enabling sharing of resources with other members of the same working environment.
The D4Science Infrastructure is serving thousands of users (more than ''15,000 registered users in April 2021'') by ''165 active VREs'' offered via ''19 Science gateways''.
History
The D4Science initiative has been developed and supported by several European projects.
DILIGENT (2004-2007) in the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development was the forerunner where a testbed infrastructure built by integrating
digital library
A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital me ...
and
grid computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...
technologies and resources was conceived and developed to serve the needs of communities of practice involved in knowledge development.
In the context of the Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration the development of the D4Science initiative started with the support of D4Science (2008-2009), D4Science-II (2009-2011), ENVRI (2011-2014), EUBrazilOpenBio (2011-2013), iMarine (2011-2014). In this period the infrastructure was established and developed to serve communities of practices from domains ranging from Earth Science to Marine Science with worldwide scope
In the context of the H2020 research and innovation programme the maturity level of the D4Science infrastructure was high enough to allow a large and very diverse set of communities of practice to benefit from it and its services and further contribute to its development.
Moreover, the services offered by the infrastructure have been developed to support
open science practices.
The following projects contributed to D4Science development: BlueBRIDGE (2015-2018), EGIEngage (2015-2017), ENVRIplus (2015-2019), Parthenos (2015-2019), SoBigData (2015-2019), AGINFRAplus (2017-2019), PerformFish (2017-2022), ARIADNEplus (2019-2022), EOSC-Pillar (2019-2022), DESIRA (2019-2023), RISIS2 (2019-2022). Supported communities and cases range from Agri-food
to Social Data Science
, Earth Science
and Marine Science.
[
]
See also
*
European Open Science Cloud the European initiative for creating an environment for hosting and processing research data and promote open science.
*
European Grid Infrastructure
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international rese ...
the e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing and data analytics services for research and innovation.
*
OpenAIRE
The Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, also called Framework Programmes or abbreviated FP1 to FP9, are funding programmes created by the European Union/European Commission to support and foster research in the Europea ...
the European initiative to shift scholarly communication towards openness and transparency and to facilitate innovative ways to communicate and monitor research.
External links
D4Science WebsiteD4Science GatewaysD4Science for developers and practitionersD4Science Support Center
References
{{Cloud computing
E-Science
Cloud computing