DRIVER

The DRIVER Virtual Research Environment (VRE) enhances the off-line capabilities underlying the DRIVER portal, which currently harvests, aggregates, and curates approximately 700,000 documents from 150 repositories in 20 countries, as well as the on-line services offered to its users. 

The present DRIVER e-Infrastructure, from which the portal has been built, does not have the necessary hardware and software resources to handle any computationally-intensive or storage-heavy high-value and innovative end-user services, e.g., cutting-edge search, advanced user profiling and bibliometric document analysis for personalization, etc. D4Science-II will create a programmatically accessible VRE that will offer access to computationally-intensive services, including some related to interoperability itself, i.e., metadata brokerage, data transformations, and ontology-based mapping. It will also support the concept of enhanced publications, which consists of DRIVER content potentially linked to any other data available in the ecosystem. Finally, it will incorporate the bibliometric-data-mining and metrics- calculation services implemented for the INSPIRE scenario to provide new sophisticated information retrieval and personalisation functionality.

Through the DRIVER portal, researchers can plug into a large shared information space and use scientific content using several user services, including search, data collection, profiling and recommendation. A number of new requirements have been highlighted and impose to solve specific technological issues. Among them the followings:

• When trying to build high-value and innovative end-user services on top of DRIVER e- Infrastructure, the need for computation and storage intensive processing emerges. For example, specific, cutting edge information retrieval services, (such as inference mechanisms, metadata brokerage etc) can potentially be quite demanding, in terms of logic and resources. The DRIVER e-Infrastructure mainly builds on the repository concept which until recently has left out the need for computation and storage intensive processing.
• Access to external data sets is mandatory to support enhanced publications. These documents contain link to original data which might be parts of, or entire, huge data sets. These sets have to be referenced and acquired via formal means (specs for referencing and exchanging them). The DRIVER e-Infrastructure at the moment does not yet include considerable data repositories to support an extensive exploitation of this facility.
• Good quality user services increasingly depend on personalization capabilities. The realization of these capabilities requires the availability of precise bibliometric analysis on large collections of data and user behaviour recordings. Only very simple information of this type is available in DRIVER at the moment. More sophisticated analysis tools would be needed.

Note: This scenario responds to the concrete demands of the scientific community, which plans to make the final outcome of D4Science-II available in its own production working environment at the end of the project.