HydroShare tools and recommended practices for sharing and publishing
data and models in support of collaborative reproducible research
Abstract
HydroShare is a domain specific data and model repository operated by
the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science
Inc. (CUAHSI) to advance hydrologic science by enabling individual
researchers to more easily share products resulting from their research.
The community platform supports, not just the scientific publication
summarizing a study, but also the data, models and workflow scripts used
to create the scientific publication and reproduce the results therein.
HydroShare accepts data from anybody, and supports Findable, Accessible,
Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles. HydroShare is comprised of
two sets of functionality: (1) a repository for users to share and
publish data and models, collectively referred to as resources, in a
variety of formats, and (2) tools (web apps) that can act on content in
HydroShare and support web based access to compute capability. Together
these serve as a platform for collaboration and computation that
integrates data storage, organization, discovery, and analysis through
web applications (web apps) and that allows researchers to employ
services beyond the desktop to make data storage and manipulation more
reliable and scalable, while improving their ability to collaborate and
reproduce results. This presentation will describe the capabilities
developed for HydroShare to support the full research data management
life cycle. Data can be entered into HydroShare as soon as it is
collected, and initially shared only with the team directly working on
the data. As analysis proceeds, tools, scripts and models that act on
the data to produce research results may be stored in HydroShare
resources alongside the data. At the time of publication these resources
may be permanently published and receive digital object identifiers and
cited in research papers. Resources may themselves include citations to
the research papers, thereby linking the publications to the supporting
data, scripts and models. HydroShare design choices and capabilities for
establishing relationships and versioning, based on simplicity, and ease
of use, and some of the challenges encountered, will be discussed.