Integration with EGI Binders
ROHub also integrates EGI Binder service that enable users not only to open and execute their Jupyter Notebooks directly from ROHub portal, but also to reproduce the full computing environment by pre-loading all the libraries and dependencies required to execute the notebook resource. Binder supports the best practices that are reproducible in data science by utilizing community-developed standards for reproducibility.
In order to use this functionality the user needs to have an account with access to EGI Binder service and also need to have an account and be logged in ROHub. Moreover the resource to be reproduced must have type “Jupyter Notebook” and the Research Object must aggregate at least one configuration file named requirements.txt or environment.yml
The notebook is connected to the configuration file via the relation “Software Requirements” (from schema.org). This relation can be established by selecting the notebook in the resources section of the Research Object edition mode, and then creating the relation under the show all annotations, as depicted in Figure below.
In addition to the environment requirements, the user is able to specify data resources (e.g., input dataset) or other resources that should be available from Binder once the notebook is loaded. In order to specify these resources, the user needs to create a file e.g., datasets.txt, which contains the list of resources that need to be available from Binder, and connect it to the notebook via the relation “Requires Dataset”. Each required resource is identified via its URI (e.g., shared link in ROHub) and specified in a separate line in the file, as depicted in the block below.
https://w3id.org/ro-id-dev/a19fad22-2896-4223-bbef-2e81168687a2/resources/dac9a837-ddf6-4d49-b68b-8abb1846ebe9
https://w3id.org/ro-id-dev/a19fad22-2896-4223-bbef-2e81168687a2/resources/098c84b4-d017-466a-9f4a-083b2f723dbb
https://w3id.org/ro-id-dev/a19fad22-2896-4223-bbef-2e81168687a2/resources/c9d19403-55bb-48c4-ab65-5fbd83f1478a
When the user clicks on such resource in ROHub portal,independently if it’s an internal or external resource the user can choose to go to the resource itself (to download the notebook) or to open it in EGI Binder, as depicted in the figure below. If the user opens the resource in EGI Binder, the service will be launched, all the dependencies will be imported to recreate the computing environment, the specified datasets will be made available from the environment, and then the user will be able to execute the notebook.