10.1109/eScience.2017.51

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.