Case Study: ENVRI Science Demonstrators with D4Science

Abstract

Whenever a community of practice starts developing an IT solution for its use case(s) it has to face the issue of carefully selecting “the platform” to use. Such a platform should match the requirements and the overall settings resulting from the specific application context (including legacy technologies and solutions to be integrated and reused, costs of adoption and operation, easiness in acquiring skills and competencies). There is no one-size-fits-all solution that is suitable for all application context, and this is particularly true for scientific communities and their cases because of the wide heterogeneity characterising them. However, there is a large consensus that solutions from scratch are inefficient and services that facilitate the development and maintenance of scientific community-specific solutions do exist. This chapter describes how a set of diverse communities of practice efficiently developed their science demonstrators (on analysing and producing user-defined atmosphere data products, greenhouse gases fluxes, particle formation, mosquito diseases) by leveraging the services offered by the D4Science infrastructure. It shows that the D4Science design decisions aiming at streamlining implementations are effective. The chapter discusses the added value injected in the science demonstrators and resulting from the reuse of D4Science services, especially regarding Open Science practices and overall quality of service.