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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

Main results

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