bioCADDIE Webinar

The exchange, reproduction, preservation and reuse of scientific outcomes is dependent on reporting and exchanging more than just the article. Other projects of research – “Research Objects” such as data, standard operating procedures, computational codes and algorithms – need to be bundled, exchanged and interpreted along with the narrative. The NIH BD2K Commons program talks about “Research Objects” in terms of recognising the multi-various products of research as first-class artifacts in their own right. But it is important to recognise that research has many products and these are linked: the data, SOPs, samples, and models that together support a finding; or the software codes and services that together are needed as the steps in a computational workflow. Thus Research Objects (RO) also need to be a framework to bundle and link potentially scattered resources, using pre-existing metadata standards to carry research context and “off-the-shelf” container infrastructures. 

Through various European Union (EU) and national projects, we have been developing a framework for Research Objects. The framework attempts to be as lightweight as possible using: identity, layered community standards for metadata representation of the RO “manifest”; and commodity container mechanisms such as Zip and Docker. This talk presents the principles and models of our Research Object framework, the RO services needed and experiences of three Use Cases:  the FAIRDOM Systems Biology Commons, The Farr RO Commons for the UK’s Health care Farr Institutes, and Computational workflow preservation and reproducibility.