VRE4EIC - Deliverable 3.1 Architecture Design

This deliverable presents the initial Reference Architecture of the VRE4EIC Project. The Reference Architecture is one of the results of the first year of work of the project. In order to derive it, the project conducted more than sixty interviews, and carefully characterized five existing e-Research Infrastructures. This way, it obtained a significant picture of the needs of the scientists, and of how these needs are met by the existing e-Research Infrastructures. This picture was an input to the architects of the Project, who analysed it in detail, and distilled an exhaustive list of functions whose implementation is needed to satisfy the requirements in ways that advance the current e-Research Infrastructures. Competence in software system design and development, as well as consideration of existing standards and best practices, allowed the VRE4EIC architects to group functions into components, and to further structure components in sub-components, thereby laying the basic building blocks of the Reference Architecture. Each component or sub-component was assigned a set of interfaces, each consisting of methods performing the tasks that provide the lowest level of granularity of the Reference Architecture. An intense activity of verification then ensued, aiming at verifying that the methods on the component interfaces could be appropriately composed into complex workflows able to realize the required functionality. The deliverable presents the result of this work, and documents the activities and the decisions that led to it. Based on this solid piece of work, the project is entering its second year of activity. While keeping the Reference Architecture aligned with additionally collected requirements and e-RI characterizations, a gap analysis will be conducted to assess two existing Virtual Research Environments with respect to the Reference Architecture. The gap analysis will allow the project to select the components of the Reference Architecture that will be implemented in order to enhance the selected Virtual Research Environments. As a result of these activities, at the end of the project the final Reference Architecture will be released.