A Graph-based Architecture for Data Curation in Science Gateways

Science gateways can add value for researchers by empowering them to organize their data in a way that tells a compelling science story. In the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure, users associate their data with metadata entities that represent different aspects of an experiment or simulation, then assemble those entities into a hierarchical tree which represents the overall research project. We present a novel design for a data curation architecture which provides feature parity with the DesignSafe model, but which can be provided ”out of the box” in containerized science gateway solutions. This provides a path forward for advanced data curation features in gateways supporting any conceivable scientific domain. Our proposed architecture represents the data curation hierarchy as a directed tree which can be manipulated using standard graph analysis libraries. This design is broadly applicable because it provides a strong
separation of concerns between the construction of the entity tree and the management of its constituent metadata records.