Partners: SSHOC (CESSDA ERIC), EOSC Life (INSTRUCT ERIC)
Project description
This project will expand the ARIA platform, an existing tool within Life Sciences, to cover the needs of research infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities domain.
Although the Social Sciences domain differs significantly from that of the Life Sciences, the internal management processes and requirements for most distributed research infrastructures are similar across all areas. While ARIA was initially modelled around access to instruments, in the Social Sciences and Humanities restrictions are placed on data access. By the end of the project, it will be possible use ARIA to establish a workflow for submitting, reviewing and approving/denying requests to access Social Science and Humanities data, in a similar way that access to Life Sciences instruments is currently managed.
Societal challenge
The use case of managing access to restricted data facilitates responsible and excellent research for research communities.
By providing these services, RIs participating in the EOSC Future project contributed to scientific developments as well as to societal cohesion. Given that restricted data may concern vulnerable societal groups or sensitive information for people, experiments and scientific products were treated accordingly.
Technical challenge
Managing user access requests can be particularly challenging for growing organisations that do not (yet) have solutions in place to manage such requests. At the same time, existing solutions might not be easily adaptable to changing needs and requirements of the institution. In contrast to adoption of generic workflow solutions, such as ticketing systems, the use of the ARIA platform enables repository providers to outsource the work with all of its parts into a single platform, where the interactions with researchers and reviewers are all realised in a single place.
ARIA was designed to control access to physical objects, such as research facilities, scientific instruments and machines. The terminology of the User Interface must be switchable between domains, so that it can cater for virtual resources (such as datasets) as well. To do this, the underlying resource model had to be extended and the labels shown to the user were made editable.
The EOSC Future added value
- Extended the existing ARIA data model to enable it to represent data objects and added functionality to manage access to datasets
- Extended the ARIA API to allow EOSC compatible repositories and registries to push datasets representations into ARIA
- Applied the ARIA access restriction model to the So.Da.Net Data Catalogue
- Demonstrated the inherited integration with the CESSDA Data Catalogue, which aggregates the So.Da.Net and other Social Sciences Catalogues, and serves as a pilot implementation for aggregators, with the specification available for any other EOSC catalogue to adopt
Main results
- ARIA platform extension – manage access to datasets, as well as instruments
- ARIA API extension – ability to push dataset representations into ARIA
- Pilot implementation with Data Catalogues – direct and via aggregation
Other resources
- Demo video presenting the ARIA platform
- ARIA Data Access Management (ADAM) IR guidelines