DESIRA - D5.2: Virtual Research Environment Operation Report years 1-2

This deliverable D5.2 "Virtual Research Environment Operation Report years 1-2" describes the activities carried out during the first 24 months of the DESIRA project within Work Package 5. Specifically in Task 5.1 "Knowledge Infrastructure: the DESIRA Virtual Research Environment" and Task 5.2 "Integration of Services and Tools, and Use Reporting". It reports the procedures governing the operation of the VREs as well as the status of the aggregated resources at mid-term in the DESIRA infrastructure. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are "systems" specifically conceived to provide their users with a web-based set of facilities (including services, data and computational facilities) to accomplish a set of tasks by dynamically relying on the underlying infrastructure. VREs are among the key products to be developed and delivered by the DESIRA project to support Project coordination, Living Labs activities and Rural Digitization Forums activities. The development of VREs is based on three main activities: (i) the development of software artefacts that realise a set of functions (including those needed for accessing specific datasets), (ii) the deployment of these artefacts in an operational infrastructure following the release procedures and tools, and (iii) the final deployment and operation of well-defined Virtual Research Environments by exploiting the facilities offered by the underlying D4Science infrastructure and its services [1, 2]. This report documents the last of the above three activities - i.e. the exploitation of the services and technologies offered by the underlying infrastructure to serve the needs of defined scenarios - as implemented in the context of the DESIRA project from June 2019 to May 2021. The DESIRA Infrastructure Gateway actually offers end-user access to 14 VREs. As of June 2019, 1 VREs were created and operated. Specifically, the DESIRA Project VRE (cf. Sec 3.1.1) was created before the project kick-off. As of May 2021, these VREs have served the needs of more than 370 users and more than 7.000 user sessions. This required dealing with 177 tickets (103 related to the project management, 28 requests for support and enhancements, five requests for incidents and bugs, 14 requests for VRE creations).