The project Humanities at Scale (HaS) developed a service for the submission of the in-kind contributions for the DARIAH ERIC member states.
This aim for this reference architecture (RA) is to formally describe in-kind contributions for submission to DARIAH-EU. As such, this RA is not an architectural description of the technical elements of a centralised infrastructure, but more of a high-level description of the possible components of a highly-distributed network of services, activities and resources. This reference architecture was developed in parallel with the documentation on the in-kind contributions developed in 2016 to 2017: in fact, it further develops the in-kind definition and components by using a formal language, borrowed from the theoretical models used for distributed ICT systems. More information on what is meant by infrastructure architectures and a reference architecture is available.
The Reference Architecture for DARIAH-EU Contributions is discussed in four parts:
There is also a Glossary and a Colophon for this work.
This section, Introduction, provides:
- An introduction to the motivation for this work,
- the relevant background to the methodological approach, consisting of the Open Distributed Processing Reference Model (ODP-RM) and the Reference Model for SSH Data Infrastructures (RM-SSH),
- introduces the concept of viewpoints used throughout the Reference Architecture (DARIAH-RA),
- and concludes with further work required for the DARIAH-RA
Goals
The main goals of such reference architecture are:
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To communicate and to describe contributions in a common language and to have a common understanding of which components should be described. The in-kind contributions have never been formally described before, including their creation processes. Without the RA, the contributions submission process would, and has, resulted in contributions interpreted and labelled in different ways by each contributing country, thus making the in-kind registry highly heterogeneous and unreliable from an end user perspective.
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To facilitate the description of the interactions between components of the in-kinds, according to the services or functions they provide. How do the components of the contributions interact? How are they connected? What this reference architecture brings to life is not only a reliable description of the DARIAH contributions, but their description as processes and evolving systems, rather than immovable objects. We think therefore, that it is important to describe these changes and interactions with the environments in which the contributions evolve.
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To offer an architectural reference for other projects and infrastructures that wish to offer similar services to their (research) communities.
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To mitigate and reduce risk. We consider this reference architecture as a way of reducing the risk mainly derived from the first point: that of interpreting the in-kind contributions in different ways, to describe them without a common reference model. This risk exists not only among partners inside the same research infrastructure, but also for anyone who accesses the DARIAH contributions from other infrastructures.