GEDE - Group of European Data Experts in RDA

GEDE New Action

Canonical Workflow Frameworks for Science

CWFS

After the many discussions and meetings about EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) during the last year, which required much time and effort of those experts engaged in advanced data management activities, and still being restricted by COVID despite all video meetings, which slowed down our activities, we are now ready to restart our activities within GEDE. The restart is based on deep insights in what researchers in many research infrastructures (>60 across all disciplinaries) are actually doing in their "data labs". Those that were involved found a few paradoxes and we are working on a paper to describe our impressions properly. One of these paradoxes is that on the one hand almost all speak about FAIR and Open Science and recommend to follow the principles, but that on the other hand the actual practices did not change significantly during the last years.

Of course, researchers will only change practices if they can see a real benefit for their work and a certain degree of stability of the new methods being offered. Therefore, researchers were not interested in protocols such as TCP/IP, for example, but were happy to use new possibilities that were enabled by the Internet after some years of stabilisation. The GEDE community worked hard on the concept of Digital Objects which were extended to FAIR Digital Objects recently in collaboration with RDA Data Fabric, GOFAIR, some ESFRI communities, DONA and CNRI with thre result that we have now achieved a good insight of its capabilities and the remaining challenges to be addressed. But it would be wrong to expect researchers' immediate interests. This will only emerge if there are clear benefits provided by more efficient methods and new features including a chance to improve long term persistency.

We therefore need to take the next step with more emphasis and work on "reference installations", on "sizable testbeds" and on tools that would help the individual researcher to effectively improve his/her work without noticing that we are creating FAIR compliant Digital Objects and thus helping to overcome some of these huge inefficiencies in data-intensive science. In this realm another paradoxe which we observed is of interest. Although many re-occuring patterns can be identified and although many different types of technical workflow frameworks are out there (CWL, Taverna, Jupyter, etc.), they are hardly being used and if only in fragmentary ways.

Therefore, we decided to start a new track within GEDE which we call "Canonical Workflow Frameworks for Science". The goal is not to create yet another technical workflow language or framework, but to focus on the scientific needs and steps. We need first to understand in much detail which kind of features such scientifically motivated frameworks should have to be of real help to researchers and how abstractions can be made to come to tools that can be used across-disciplinary boundaries. We are aware of the fact that this is not a trivial enterprise. Until now a group of 40 experts from across many disciplines and countries have indicated their interest in this work. More can be expected in the coming months. If you are interested about more details contact Peter Wittenburg (peter.wittenburg@mpcdf.mpg.de).

All work that has been carried out by GEDE in the last years is being documented on the GEDE-Github site:

https://github.com/GEDE-RDA-Europe/GEDE

We should note that the small financial support we received from RDA Europe stopped in spring 2020.

The aim of the Group of European Data Experts in RDA (GEDE-RDA) is to promote, foster and drive the discussions and consensus forming on creating guidelines, core components and concrete data fabric configuration building based on a bottom-up process. To achieve these goals GEDE-RDA is composed of a group of European data professionals appointed by invitation from various European Research Infrastructures and some specialists from the Research Data Alliance. The core group includes delegates from 47 European research infrastructures. The chairs from ESFRI and eIRG agreed to take an observation role. GEDE-RDA operates within the global RDA framework thereby guaranteeing that the discussions are openly communicated and publicly accessible to the global community of experts. GEDE-RDA was established and supported by the third RDA Europe Project from 2016 on and also received funding from RDA Europe IV which stopped in spring 2020.

All activities which GEDE carried out can be accessed at our github site: https://github.com/GEDE-RDA-Europe/GEDE .

The GEDE work is based on a charter that describes its mission and a procedure document. After 4 years of work it might need a refreshment.

The following activities were carried out from 2016 on:

• Broad discussions on PID Usage (Persistent Identifiers) that resulted in a paper which was published in November 2017 and deposited in Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/1116189). It was one of the key documents influencing the work on PIDs within EOSC.
• The concept of Digital Objects (DO) was of great interest for many experts across disciplines and countries. It received support from about 130 interested experts and many activities were carried out. For more information see here. In 2019/2020 the DO concept was extended to FAIR DOs to make it fully FAIR compliant. Basically, the systematic use of semantically declared concepts in metadata needs to be required to make DOs fully machine actionable. For more information see here.
• Since the ways we are Citing Data are quite heterogeneous a report on Data Citation was finished after GEDE discussions. For more information see here.
• The role and function of Digital Repositories was discussed between GEDE experts resulting in a report. For more information see here.
•  The usefullness of Blockchain technology in science was subject of GEDE discussions and resulted in a report. For more information see here.

In addition, GEDE organised surveys on actual topics (FAIR, EOSC, state of practices in the labs) and co-organised several workshops and meetings.

Membership for this group is on invitation only. For the GEDE interaction a separate email list will be used. All essential communications and notes will be open for RDA members.

Two core-chairs are respnsible to organise the GEDE work: Carlo Maria Zwölf and Peter Wittenburg. In case of questions about GEDE activities, please contact Peter (peter.wittenburg@mpcdf.mpg.de).

GEDE-RDA members

We are currently in a phase of updating the members list, since many more are active in the GEDE DO topic group and some names seem to be outdated.

Observers