Finalized:
Tuesday, July 18, 2017Author(s):
Ton That, D.H., G. Fils, Z. Yuan, T. MalikAssociated Group(s):
Scientists often need to share their work. Typically, their data is shared in the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Scientists’ work,however, may not be limited to data, but can also include code, provenance, documents, etc. The Research Object has recently emerged as a method for the identification, aggregation, and exchange of this scholarly information on the Web. Several science communities now engage in a formal process to create research objects and share them on scholarly exchange websites such as Figshare or Hydroshare, but often sharing is not sufficient for scientists. They need to compute further on the shared information. In this paper, we present the sciunit, a reusable research object whose contents can be re-computed, and thus measured. We describe how to efficiently create, store, and repeat computational work with sciunits. We show through experiments that sciunits can replicate and re-run computational applications with minimal storage and processing overhead. Finally, we provide an overview of sharing and reproducible cyberinfrastructure based on sciunits, increasingly being used in the domain of geosciences.
Suggested Citation:
D.H. Ton That, G. Fils, Z. Yuan, T. Malik.. "Sciunits: Reusable Research Objects.," IEEE eScience, 2017. DOI:10.1109/eScience.2017.51
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1722152. Opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the NSF.