DESIRA D5.3 - Virtual Research Environment operation report years 3-4

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

VRE  E-infrastructure  Digitisation  Rural areas  Virtual Research Environment 

This deliverable D5.3 "Virtual Research Environment Operation Report years 3-4" is the revised and updated version of deliverable D5.2 "Virtual Research Environment Operation Report years 1-2". It describes the activities carried out during the DESIRA project within Work Package 5. Specifically, in Task 5.1 "Knowledge Infrastructure: the DESIRA Virtual Research Environment" and Task 5.2 "Integration of Services and Tools and Use Reporting". It reports the procedures governing the operation of the VREs as well as the status of the aggregated resources at the end of the project in the DESIRA infrastructure. 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 to be developed and delivered by the DESIRA project to support Project coordination, Living Labs activities and Rural Digitization Forums activities. The development of VREs is based on three main activities: (i) the development of software artefacts that realise a set of functions (including those needed for accessing specific datasets), (ii) the deployment of these artefacts in an operational infrastructure following the release procedures and tools, 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, 2]. This report documents the last of the above 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 context of the DESIRA project. The DESIRA Infrastructure Gateway offers end-user access to 14 VREs. As of May 2023, 14 VREs were created and operated. Specifically, the DESIRA Project VRE (cf. Sec 3.1.1) was created before the project kick-off. These VREs have served the needs of more than 390 users and more than 10.200 user sessions. This required dealing with 185 tickets (121 related to the project management, 43 requests for tasks, support and enhancements; 7 requests for incidents and bugs; 14 requests for VRE creations).