D13.2 – VREs Operation Mid-term Activity Report

This deliverable D13.2 - “VREs Operation Mid-term Activity Report” describes the activities carried out during the first 24 months of the ARIADNEplus project within Work Package 13. Specifically, in Task 13.1 Infrastructure Operation (JRA2.1) and Task 13.3 VREs Operation (JRA2.3). It reports the procedures governing the operation of the VREs as well as the status of the aggregated resources at mid-term in the ARIADNEplus infrastructure. Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are “systems” specifically conceived to provide their users with a webbased set of facilities (including services, data and computational facilities) to accomplish a set of tasks by dynamically relying upon the underlying infrastructure. VREs are among the key products to be developed and delivered by the ARIADNEplus project to support the target communities and application scenarios in archaeology. The development of VREs is based on three main activities: (i) the development of software artefacts that realise a set of functions (including those needed for accessing certain datasets), (ii) the deployment of these artefacts in an operational infrastructure following the release procedures and tools presented in the deliverable D13.1 “Software Release Procedures and Tools JRA2”, and (iii) the final deployment and operation of well-defined Virtual Research Environments by exploiting the facilities offered by the underlying D4Science infrastructure and its services1 . This report documents the last of the above three activities – i.e. the exploitation of the services and technologies offered by the underlying infrastructure to serve the needs of defined scenarios – as implemented in the context of the ARIADNEplus project from January 2019 to December 2020. As of January 2021, 5 VREs were created and operated. Specifically, the ARIADNEplus Project VRE (cf. Sec 3.1) which was created first and prior to the project kickoff. The ARIADNEplus Mappings VRE, to support metadata mappings. (cf. Sec. 3.2). The ARIADNEplus Aggregation Management VRE, where project partners discuss data integration issues and procedures to activate or propose to the whole consortium (cf. Sec. 3.3). The Geoportal Prototype VRE (cf. Sec. 3.4), developed for the integration, validation, harmonisation, visualisation, and access of archaeological georeferenced datasets collected in Italy, and the Archeomar VRE, developed for the visualisation and controlled access of archaeological georeferenced datasets (cf. Sec. 3.5). As of January 2021, these VREs have served the needs of more than 260 users in total spread across 21 countries, and nearly 5.000 user sessions. This required to deal with approximately 100 tickets (59 requests for support, 9 requests for incidents and bugs, 9 requests for Virtual Machine or Container creations)