Open Data Explorer: Bringing Computing to Open Research Data

Data repositories allow open access to research data, but researchers most of the time need to "download" large datasets and find ways to explore them to understand their content and quality. Open Data Explorer aims to lessen these needs and facilitate rapid exploratory data analysis and visualisation of research data by providing a ready-to-use interactive computing platform where research data is directly available for computing. Each user is provided with a dedicated computing environment based on JupyterLab that supports interactive notebooks and a rich set of data access, analysis, and visualization packages. The platform enables zero waiting time access to a large number of datasets, including popular and newly published datasets on widely-used data repositories such as Zenodo, Figshare, Dataverse, and 4TU.ResearchData. Example exploratory data analysis notebooks tailored according to dataset contents are also automatically generated for each dataset and made available to the users.