From data acquisition to data space publication

Nowadays, research data management (RDM) is shaped by various software that that governs certain aspects of the research data life cycle: Electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) are increasingly used to digitize information about data acquisition, data repositories have been established for data publication and systems like LinkAhead [1], OpenBIS [2] and others aim at bridging the gap between data acquisition and data publication. Data spaces [3] are an emerging technology that shall facilitate data exchange. Unlike research data repositories, where access is typically not restricted, data spaces focus on restricted data access and trust among participants. Data space membership is attractive for private companies since they offer incentives like data monetization. Thus, data spaces are a good candidate to enhance data exchange between research and the private sector. In this contribution, we report on our experiences in the "FAIR Data Spaces Project" [4], which "combined the federated, secure data infrastructure Gaia-X and NFDI" [5]. Within this project, we connected the virtual research environment Kadi [6] via a data quality assurance pipeline to a data space based on the eclipse data space components (EDC) [7]. Kadi hosts for example data from the POLiS [8] consortium and is developed as part of NFDI4Ing [9] and other initiatives. We complement this report with a glance at ongoing development, mainly in the scope of the EUROPE HORIZON project BatCAT [10] and demonstrate how multiple open source RDM tools can be integrated and connected to a data space. In essence, the LinkAhead Crawler [11] component is used to integrate data from the ELN eLabFTW, Kadi and file systems into LinkAhead. LinkAhead in turn is bound to an EDC Connector such that datasets stored in LinkAhead can be published in the data space. In case of eLabFTW, the integration is based on calls to a REST-API that retrieves resources and synchronizes those with the LinkAhead instance. This integration is fine-grained and allows including files which were uploaded to eLabFTW without replicating them in LinkAhead if read access to those files is granted to the LinkAhead instance. On the other hand, the integration of Kadi is based on the ELN File format [12] which is based on RO-Crate [13]. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of those two kinds of integration. Furthermore, we discuss our design decisions on how to connect the RDM software LinkAhead to an EDC data space and report on the implementation of a demonstrator. This includes a presentation of our approach to tackle possible data model mismatches between the RDM software and the data space. Our contribution demonstrates how multiple open source software components can be combined to facilitate holistic RDM across those components. The ability to seamlessly create data offers in a data space facilitates data exchange and data reuse.