Table of contents
Introduction
ROHub is a research object management platform supporting the preservation and lifecycle management of scientific investigations, research campaigns and operational processes. As the only existing platform implementing natively the full research object model and paradigm, resources associated to a particular experiment are aggregated in a single digital entity (research object), and metadata reliant to understand and interpret the content is represented as semantic annotations that are user and machine readable.
ROHub can support different stakeholders, with the primary focus on scientists, researchers, students and enthusiasts, enabling them to manage and preserve their research work, to share it and make it available for publishing, to collaborate and to discover new knowledge. However, other user groups can be benefited by ROHub like the Industry that can leverage the platform to externalize their research to a community of researchers worldwide in multiple scientific domains, e.g., launching campaigns for research on specific topics, and to follow and monitor the progress. Similarly, investors can keep up to date and track scientific advances to fund and get involved in future breakthroughs. As another example, publishers can also leverage ROHub to advertise their journals with researchers, have access to a pool of potential reviewers, and implement more interactive review processes.
ROHub portal
ROHub portal is a Web client application providing a comprehensive user interface for the management and preservation of research objects (ROs). ROHub portal integrates and provides access to different research object services, such as:
- The core RO backend service, enabling the creation, storage, maintenance and access to research objects, the management of their lifecycle, and their preservation. The backend leverages various EOSC services including Zenodo and B2Share for RO publication, as well as B2Drop for resources storage (ongoing).
- RO backend also includes a notification service, enabling the subscription to events related to a particular research object (e.g., changes in content or quality), or to the portal itself (e.g., when new ROs are created).
- The ROHub AIM (Identity and Access Management) service, powered by Keycloack open source solution, and which is integrated with EOSC AIM service (EGI check-in)
- RO enrichment service (also onboarded in EOSC), which generates automatically semantic annotations based on the (textual) resources aggregated in order to improve the discoverability and searchability of research objects.
- RO PDF generation service, allowing the retrieval of the RO in paper style in PDF format.
- EOSC (EGI) Notebooks (under integration) to allow the loading of notebooks aggregated in an RO directly on the EGI notebooks environment.
- RO checklists service (under integration), providing remote access to the minim-based evaluation of research objects, used to test for completeness, runnability or repeatability.
- RO stability service (under integration), enabling the evaluation of the RO through time by capturing concrete values provided by the checklist service in different moments of its evolution. It allows testing the ability of a research object to achieve its original purpose after being subject to changes on its resources.
- RO stability includes the RO monitoring tool, providing an interface to visually monitor and keep track of the status of external datasets and web services required for workflow execution. It’s based on the stability service.
- RO collaboration spheres (under integration), providing an interface for the discovery of research objects that are similar or related to the selected research object or scientist.