EUDAT Link: Integração da plataforma Dendro com a rede de gestão de dados europeia EUDAT

• Main Author: Fábio Filipe Jesus da Silva
• Publication Date: 2016
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/85803
• topic: Ciências da computação e da informação; Computer and information sciences

There has been an increasing number of initiatives to make scientific researches available to a broad range of users in order to contribute for better science. From data management plans that lead researchers to think about open access strategies beforehand, to make research results publicly available, all these kinds of movements are part of the broad definition of "Open Science". Researchers produce datasets in diverse formats, covering several specific research domains. When research projects come to an end, their datasets can be deposited in platforms responsible for their preservation and dissemination. Recent guidelines are pushing researchers to actively manage their produced data and ensure that they get to an appropriate repository at the end of their work. Nevertheless, research data can't be understood without additional information about it, so context must be provided by researchers themselves, in order to facilitate their understanding by external parties, which is metadata. From the author's name to the temperature of a solution during some measurements, every metadata field adds value to the long-term survival of data. The former is easily gathered without the researcher's intervention, but the same does not apply to the latter. This domain-level description can only be done by researchers, who should do it ideally in early stages in their research workflow. Their participation in the description process is then important, and they often do it using less conventional formats like free text on paper notes that easily get lost. Researchers can achieve a better description if they are given appropriate tools to describe their data without requiring much effort or losing focus on their project, in early stages. Dendro platform, created on the Faculty of Engineering in the University of Porto, plays the role of a collaborative and descriptive tool for researchers during the initial stages of data production, allowing them to make descriptions with domain vocabularies. Data description is a task that is often already a part of daily research activities, but done in fragile or temporary supports. Dendro is not designed as a preservation platform, but instead focused on enabling researchers to incrementally describe their data. Dendro focuses then on the initial stages of the research workflow, where researchers are more aware of their data's characteristics, thus serving as a staging platform that can later connect to external repositories specifically designed for data preservation and dissemination on the long run. EUDAT intends to be the pan-European platform of reference for research data management. It features several modules, each one with specific features to accommodate researchers' needs in terms of storage, processing and refinement, collaboration and preservation. EUDAT is a large set of tools that fulfills the main requirements within this field, plus having great marketing, having a set of experimental services that can be adopted at institutional level. This work leverages Dendro's capabilities to handle data description across several domains and produce extensive metadata records, by providing means for data to be available, which means a deposition into EUDAT. Disclosure restrictions may be part of some research projects, so privacy levels were implemented within Dendro to protect sensitive data. All records are standard-compliant, and EUDAT makes use of that particularity to improve the dataset's visibility and chances of being retrieved and reused later on. This deposition is achieved by two different approaches: in first place, through an OAI-PMH server that exposes metadata from "public" and "metadata-only" projects on a regular basis to EUDAT's B2Find module. A "public" project provides a read-only view for anyone that accesses the project's page, whilst a "metadata-only" project can only be seen by requesting access to its creator, which can be easily made through the project's page. Secondly, a project's data and metadata are packaged and sent to EUDAT's B2Share module upon researcher's request, which is made via Dendro's interface. By the time the package is sent, all relevant metadata from the project itself is sent along to describe it within B2Share, which is later fundamental for retrieving that same data. All the researchers need is then the record's URL, which is immediately shown on the screen and sent to the email, so they can track it at any time. This same page provides the researcher with an handler that uniquely identifies the dataset and that redirects to this same page. This module, which makes the bridge between institutional and international levels, contributes effectively to the long-term preservation and dissemination of data, assisting researchers on the arduous task of data deposition, which is accomplished by using all the information that was already made available by them during the Dendro phase. Tests among some researchers of different domains have proved the effectiveness of this integration module. After creating a project with an appropriate privacy level, describing it with domain metadata and depositing it within EUDAT, they made sure all data and metadata were correct in the deposit's EUDAT page. The handle they got was also valid and redirecting them to the dataset's page. To test the dissemination aspect, they made some searches within B2Share, using terms like their name, words from the description and title. Their datasets were retrieved, which means the metadata sent by Dendro was essential and that a proper description has a major role for this part.