The DASISH project developed a Reference Model based on the previous observation that there was a lack of understanding of research infrastructures and the relationships between their entities: as Research Infrastructures are distributed infrastructures, they gather numerous stakeholders and have complex organisations. Their structure and functioning is therefore not always clear to an external user. In this context, RM-ODP appears to be the most pertinent model to describe them, by providing definition of the core entities and their archetypal distribution.
SSH Data Infrastructure Community, its Data Infrastructure Community and other communities
The RM-SSH concentrated on what was considered as a common element between the five participating SSH infrastructures1, and in particular core to DARIAH, CESSDA and CLARIN, and achievable at a reference model level of abstraction. The DARIAH RA, by its nature dealing with in-kind contributions, covers aspects of a research infrastructure not covered by the RM-SSH concentration on the data infrastructure concerns. Therefore, this RA will hopefully contribute to expanding the RM-SSH.
Of the five viewpoints of ODP-RM, three are used in this higher-level reference architecture:
- the Enterprise viewpoint which describes, the communities, roles, and behaviours of the system,
- the Information viewpoint which identifies the informational objects,
- and the Computational viewpoint which describes the functionality of the system.
Note: Neither the engineering nor the technical viewpoints will be considered in this reference architecture at this point in time. The engineering viewpoint focuses on the mechanisms and functions required to support distributed interactions between objects in the system and therefore, it may be valuable, in the future to consider the engineering viewpoint for some aspects of the architecture.