EUDAT Conference Demos

eInfraCentral (EIC) is a coordination and support action funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It is a building block of the European Open Science Cloud. The EIC’s mission is to ensure that by 2020 a broader and more varied set of users discovers and accesses the existing and developing e-infrastructure capacity. 

The uptake of e-infrastructures by a wider set of stakeholders has been slow primarily due to issues of fragmentation of service offerings, lack of service discoverability, comprehensibility and clarity, as well as the inconsistent use of performance indicators for assessing added value and impact across different service providers at national and international level. e-Infrastructures’ service harmonisation and uniform representation has been key driving elements in the development of eInfraCentral. A common service catalogue enables the alignment of various different e-infrastructure service offerings along a commonly agreed service description. Such an approach to defining and monitoring e-infrastructures services will increase their uptake and enhance understanding of where improvement can be made in delivering services. 

A major output of the project is to develop a single gateway for European e-Infrastructures for end users to browse a harmonised service catalogue, and enhance the monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) that focus on availability and quality of services and user satisfaction across multiple service offerings and providers. eInfraCentral offers a first prototype for a collaborative web platform to act as the main entry point to European e-Infrastructure services. This will provide access to the existing service catalogues and related KPIs. Based on the requirement elicitation, the portal will provide different views/facets of the catalogue for different user perspectives and will act as the marketplace for e-Infrastructure services and service requests by end-users. 

The demo session at EUDAT Conference 2018 will offer all interested in an easy and wide access to Europe’s e-infrastructure services an opportunity to test the current – beta – version of the Portal. The session can be of interest to at least two audiences: 

1. the e-infrastructure services providers, i.e. pan-European, regional and national, monothematic or poly-thematic, uni-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary, who might be interested in joining the eInfraCentral markeplace

2. potential users of the e-infrastructure services who can easily compare various European e-infrastructure services and choose the one most needed.

LabTablet (github.com/feup-infolab/labtablet) is an electronic laboratory notebook app for Android targeted at automated metadata gathering for research datasets. LabTablet is coupled with Dendro: metadata models are defined in Dendro, and then a subset is selected to be used in LabTablet. Used in field work, the LabTablet collects metadata generated by researchers and also automatically generated metadata, such as location and images. As part of the EUDAT- INESC TEC Data Pilot extension, LabTablet is connecting to B2DROP, to run experiments in the semi-automatic collection of metadata.

 

The “Data collection with  B2DROP and LabTablet” demo replicates a scenario where a research group is working on a project in Dendro and at some point data is going to be collected in a field trip. The group has already selected a set of descriptors for the data. Before LabTablet is taken to the field work, the descriptors are loaded there. In the field (or laboratory) session, metadata is generated, including some automatically collected items such as location or temperature. Upon return, LabTablet syncs with Dendro, and Dendro in turn syncs with B2DROP for collaboration with other members of the group or for reporting. In this demo we will also demonstrate node-b2drop (github.com/feup-infolab/node-b2drop) a library that we wrote to integrate B2Drop with any NodeJS application, and that is being used by Dendro.

This Demo will showcase OpenAIRE’s established services for a range of stakeholders: the Content Provider’s Dashboard,  Research Community Dashboard and OpenAIRE Monitor. Attendees will have a chance to test the services and give feedback. 

 

The Content Provider Dashboard which manages content provider registration from literature and data repositories aggregators and journals. The service offers metrics level results and a range of functionalities. Repository managers can benefit from the OpenAIRE guidelines, aligning their repository or CRIS to interoperability criteria, providing their data to the portal and thus increasing the impact of their institution's research output. Using the Content Providers’ Dashboard and the Literature Broker, moreover, they can fully exploit the rich knowledge base provided by OpenAIRE and enrich publications metadata. Not least, the Open Metrics service allows repository managers (and researchers) to monitor metrics count, both on the OpenAIRE portal and on local repositories. The Funder dashboard which allows funder to monitor their research output via programme will also be presented.  OpenAIRE offers funding bodies the opportunity to control their funded research output by first providing projects’ information to OpenAIRE, and then monitor the results with a set of dedicated tools.

 

OpenAIRE is a well-established human and technical network for supporting and monitoring Open Science policy implementation in Europe. Through its portal, OpenAIRE portal offers accurate information on Open Science, as well as handy guides and factsheets. Moreover, a wide range of training materials is available, including webinars. Being a one-stop-shop to explore over 23 million (and growing) open access records, OpenAIRE increases the visibility of research output and its discoverability through linking publications to projects and datasets, and makes project reporting easy via a direct link to the European Commission’s portal.