LS-RI - Life Sciences
SSHOC - Social Sciences and Humanities
This project expanded the ARIA platform, an existing tool within the Life Sciences domain, to cover the needs of research infrastructures in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) 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 SSH restrictions are placed on data access.
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. It is now possible to 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.
By the end of the project, it has been possible to use ARIA to establish a workflow for submitting, reviewing and approving/denying requests to access SSH data, in a similar way that access to Life Sciences instruments is currently managed.
Managing user access requests can be particularly challenging for growing organisations that do not (yet) have solutions in place to manage access 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.
Moreover, 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.