LifeWatch aims to develop Virtual Research Environments (VRE) for the study of biodiversity patterns and processes. The VRE should provide access to ICT services, data, software components but also provides a collaborative working environment where researchers can cooperate during all the research lifecycle. In the last years many VRE prototypes have been developed by different initiatives, providing an overview on advantages and disadvantages of different architectures. LifeWatch-Italy, within the framework of the alien species show case, explored the possibility to develop a workflow-oriented VRE, where researchers could harvest data from the LifeWatch dataportal and analyze them using modules embedding R script or calling external web services. A prototype of the workflow-oriented VRE (AS-VRE) has been made accessible through the LifeWatch service centre portal. In the AS-VRE researchers can replicate the statistical analyses employed in the alien species show case by using the Taverna software, a tool developed to orchestrate scientific workflows, that allows to connect tools, scripts and web services. A workflow-oriented VRE clearly can provide high flexibility, especially in term of the potential use of web services. However, this comes at the cost of a lower usability due to the complexity of orchestrating software that requires a minimum level of informatics skills, often lacking to researchers. Following a strategy proposed to overcome some usability issues, specific components have been developed to ease user interaction with the workflow execution. The AS-VRE currently allows researchers to produce a small bunch of analyses and represents a valuable starting point to think over VRE architectures and to build up a virtual research environment that will fit with important pillars such as usability, analytical power, easy access to data and software and cooperation improvement.
Opportunities and challenges of Virtual Research Environments for biodiversity study
Colangelo P;Balech B;Boggero A;Bombi P;Pierri C;
2018
Abstract
LifeWatch aims to develop Virtual Research Environments (VRE) for the study of biodiversity patterns and processes. The VRE should provide access to ICT services, data, software components but also provides a collaborative working environment where researchers can cooperate during all the research lifecycle. In the last years many VRE prototypes have been developed by different initiatives, providing an overview on advantages and disadvantages of different architectures. LifeWatch-Italy, within the framework of the alien species show case, explored the possibility to develop a workflow-oriented VRE, where researchers could harvest data from the LifeWatch dataportal and analyze them using modules embedding R script or calling external web services. A prototype of the workflow-oriented VRE (AS-VRE) has been made accessible through the LifeWatch service centre portal. In the AS-VRE researchers can replicate the statistical analyses employed in the alien species show case by using the Taverna software, a tool developed to orchestrate scientific workflows, that allows to connect tools, scripts and web services. A workflow-oriented VRE clearly can provide high flexibility, especially in term of the potential use of web services. However, this comes at the cost of a lower usability due to the complexity of orchestrating software that requires a minimum level of informatics skills, often lacking to researchers. Following a strategy proposed to overcome some usability issues, specific components have been developed to ease user interaction with the workflow execution. The AS-VRE currently allows researchers to produce a small bunch of analyses and represents a valuable starting point to think over VRE architectures and to build up a virtual research environment that will fit with important pillars such as usability, analytical power, easy access to data and software and cooperation improvement.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
