ARIADNEplus D13.4 - VREs Operation Final Activity Report

Assante M, Cirillo R, Dell'Amico A, Pagano P, Candela L, Frosini L, Lelii L, Mangiacrapa F, Panichi G, Piccioli T, Sinibaldi F

Virtual research environment  Science gateway  Operation 

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are "systems" specifically conceived to provide their users with a web-based set of facilities (including services, data and computational facilities) to accomplish a set of tasks by dynamically relying on the underlying infrastructure. VREs are among the key products developed and delivered by the ARIADNEplus project to support the target communities and application scenarios in archaeology. The development of VREs is based on three main activities: (i) the development of software artifacts that realise a set of functions (including those needed for accessing certain datasets), (ii) the deployment of these artifacts in an operational infrastructure following the release procedures and tools presented in the deliverable D13.1 "Software Release Procedures and Tools JRA2", and (iii) the final deployment and operation of well-defined Virtual Research Environments by exploiting the facilities offered by the underlying D4Science infrastructure and its services [1]. This deliverable D13.4 - "VREs Operation Final Activity Report'' is the updated version of D13.2 - "VREs Operation Mid-term Activity Report ''. D13.4 documents the last of the above- mentioned three activities - i.e. the exploitation of the services and technologies offered by the underlying infrastructure to serve the needs of defined scenarios - as implemented in the second period, from January 2021 to November 2022 - of the ARIADNEplus project. Specifically, it focuses on how the components have been exploited and operated to support the development of the ARIADNEplus VRE gateway https://ariadne.d4science.org, its underlying infrastructure, and the VREs from M25 (January 2021) to M47 (November 2022). These activities have been carried out within Work Package 13. Specifically in Task 13.1 Infrastructure Operation (JRA2.1) and Task 13.3 VREs Operation (JRA2.3). In addition to the 5 VREs created and operated in the first period, 3 more VREs were created and operated in the second reporting period, for a total of 8 VREs. One VRE of the second reporting period, namely ARIADNEplus Lab (cf. Section 4.6), was created in July 2021 as the virtual laboratory to support developers, researchers, data managers, and data analysts belonging to the archaeological community worldwide. The "Geoportale Nazionale per l'Archeologia (GNA)" VRE (cf. Section 4.7) was created in January 2022, as the evolution of the existing Geoportal Prototype VRE (cf. Section 4.4), which was developed for the integration, validation, harmonization, visualization, and access of archaeological georeferenced datasets collected in Italy. Finally, the Esquiline VRE (cf. Section 4.8) was created in October 2022 for the integration and display of data originating from 19th century excavations and historical cartography in a spatio-temporal database, allowing the reconstruction of the transformation of an urban landscape through the centuries. As of November 2022, the VREs are serving the needs of more than 400 users in total spread across 21 countries and more than 10.000 user sessions. This required to deal with approximately 100 tickets (59 requests for support, 9 requests for incidents and bugs, 9 requests for Virtual Machine or Container creations).