Definition:

A service provider manages, oversees, and has responsibility for infrastructure, software and administrative tasks and makes this system available as a hosted service to users, usually, but not necessarily, over the Internet. A hosted service provider may consist of one organisation, or a collaboration between more organisations and/or sub-contracted specialist service providers. The hosted service may be provided on a dedicated or shared-service model.

Hosting services are most often used for hosting Websites, but can also be used for hosting research data objects such as: audio-video qualitative data, quantitative data, software (and software configuration), digital documents, or information about research object and similar content. In the context of DARIAH IKC all research data object types are considered as research data, and hence services that concentrate on a specific object type as a specialisation of a hosting service.

A hosting service generally comprises of a repository, a depositing (acquisition) service, a discovery service, and (optionally) a provision service that gives access to the deposited data resources - even if the provision service per se is more connected with the contribution type “Access to resources”.

Enterprise Viewpoint

Communities

The Hosting Service IKC comprises the following communities:

Data Hosting Community: The Data Hosting Community is that who acquires, administers and curate those data created or collected by the Resource Creation Community. Within DARIAH, the Data Hosting Community is represented by an institution, which has the technical capacity of hosting research data on its servers, for a defined period of time.

Data Hosting Roles

  • Data Hosting Subsystem (passive role): the community component representing the data hosting community as a whole.
  • Data Owner (active role): a person or organisation that owns, or is responsible for, the data and determines the conditions for deposit/access with the Data Manager.
  • Data Manager (active role): an agent which is responsible for ensuring the quality of the research data during its ingest and management.
  • Preservation Manager (active role): an agent that is responsible for generating data products, and entering/registering them in the data administration service.
  • Data Administration System (passive role): A system that is responsible for registering the data products for management purposes.

Data Hosting Behaviour

The following behaviours are identified in the Data Hosting Community:

  • Acquire Data: the behaviour performed by the Data Manager, the Data Owner and the Data Administration System whereby they negotiate a submission agreement, transfer a Submission Information Package (SIP) to the Data Administration System and appraise it.
  • Curate Data: the behaviour performed by the Data Manager, the Preservation Manager, and the Data Administration System, whereby the Data Manager checks the quality of the data and removes faults. The Data Manager then adds meaningful documentation (metadata) to the data object. The Preservation Manager transforms the data to a preservation format or migrates it to another platform, creates an Archival Information Package (AIP and stores it in a Data Administration System.
  • Administer Data: the behaviour performed by the Data Manager and the Data Administration System whereby the required information for data management is administered.

Communities that typically collaborate with the Data Hosting Community are: the Resource Creation Community, Data Provisioning Community for retrieving (well-documented) data and for making the data accessible, and the Data Processing Community for e.g. transforming data or knowledge extraction.

Information Viewpoint

Differently from the Enterprise viewpoint (where the community was central), for this type of in-kind contribution the information type represents the core of the investigation. The information type needs to be considered in itself, with no reference from the community that created or is responsible for it.

Information Object Types:

  • Data: For this type of contribution, the “data” are represented by the humanities research outputs that need to be hosted. These data can be organised in structured/ unstructured data; digitised cultural objects and its related (descriptive) metadata; digital and enhanced publications

  • Agents: The administrative roles that describe who can perform an action in the hosting system and what kind of role he/she can perform (e.g. administrator, editor, user). Three are the main agents identified at the information viewpoint level for the Hosting Services: The Data Owner, who owns and is responsible for the quality of the hosted data; the Service owner is responsible for the hosting service provided; the Service Interface represents the interface between the service owner/provider and the data owner.

  • Service: The process of hosting data for an agent by a service provider.

  • Contract: It usually describes the relation between two or more agents. In the case of hosting of humanities data, the contract can establish the following responsibilities: for how long will the data be maintained? how will they be preserved? will they be enriched? how will they be accessed? what are the responsibilities of the agents? In terms of contracts, a Hosting Agreement can be identified between the Data Owner and the Service Owner.

Case Study - EASY Data Archive

Easy is the data archive for the social science and humanities in the Netherlands. This data archive has been developed and is currently maintained and enriched by DANS, an institute of the Dutch Royal Academy of Science, that has a leading role (nationally and internationally) in the development of data quality policies and research data management plans. As such, EASY offers to the research community the possibility to host their data after they have finished their research and therefore can be considered as a candidate for a DARIAH contribution Data Hosting Service.

In terms of Enterprise Viewpoint, the Data Hosting Community is represented by the DANS team, which is the community who acquires, administers and curates the dataset created by the Resource Creation Community (the researcher depositing the datasets). The team at DANS acquires the data (with the support of a submission agreement) through the submission of information packages.

To all the archived data, DANS applies the principles of the Preservation Policies of Data Archiving and Networked Services, which draws the lines of the agreement between the Data Hosting Community and the Resource Creation Community.

In terms of Information Viewpoint, the research outputs and the data delivered to EASY in order to be archived are the main data information object type for this type of contribution. According to the recommendation of DANS, the data need to be structured according a series of preferred data and metadata formats and they need to include reference to their accessibility and reuse possibility. A contract (another data object type) will then establish duties and rights for the Data Hosting Community and the Resource Creation Community by answering questions like: for how long will the data be maintained? what are the responsibilities of the stakeholders involved?