The system specification report of the SSH Open Marketplace was recently delivered in the context of the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) project. Produced within Work Package 7, led by DARIAH, and in particular Task 7.1, led by UGOE (University of Göttingen), the report defines the service requirements, data model, and system architecture for the SSHOC Marketplace, drawing thus a clearer picture of what is the Marketplace and what’s in it for researchers.
What is the SSH Open Marketplace?
A core part of the work of the SSHOC project is the building of a Marketplace — a discovery portal which pools and harmonises the tools, services, training materials and datasets useful for SSH research communities, offering a high quality and contextualised answer at every step of the SSH research data life cycles.
More specifically, the SSH Marketplace will:
- Prefer datasets related to at least one other type of content present in the portal but won’t replicate the content of existing datasets catalogues, but will Point to existing data which it contextualises but won’t host any data itself
- Act as a discovery portal to facilitate interactions and networking but won’t be the ordering layer for the resources curated and showcased.
What’s in the SSH Marketplace for Researchers & Research Libraries?
For researchers, the SSHOC marketplace will be:
- A community-gathering platform where all SSH researchers can find their peers, exchange with them but also feed on their experiences;
- Serendipity, through the contextualised answers offered to a request, researchers can discover solutions (meaning tools, activities or datasets) they hadn’t thought to consider at first and that can be of added value for them;
- Updated and quality results to all SSH requests. Indeed, through its qualitative curation process, the SSH Marketplace will be a unique access point to current research solutions.
For research libraries, the SSHOC marketplace will be:
- A well-stocked toolbox which will offer your social sciences and humanities (SSH) researchers not only tools and services but also a community of helpful, knowledgeable people who can give custom advice on how to perform particular tasks;
- An efficient way to discover resources, as the Marketplace will make it possible to find all existing resources, tools and workflows from the entire SSH community, not just those created by SSHOC;
- Something you can influence and be involved in. SSHOC will be seeking further collaboration and feedback on the Marketplace from research librarians both directly and through collaborations with LIBER Working Groups (for example, during LIBER’s 2020 Annual Conference in Belgrade, Serbia).
What is the team behind the SSH Marketplace development?
As Work Package 7 (WP7) leader in the SSHOC project, DARIAH ERIC coordinates the work for the creation of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) Open Marketplace. The team behind WP7, led by DARIAH Director Frank Fischer and DARIAH Project Officer, Laure Barbot, includes some of the DARIAH partner institutions and stakeholders who have the expertise to deliver what is also one of the four pillars of the 2019-2026 DARIAH Strategic Plan.
The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH), at the Austrian Academy of Sciences is leading the Development of the Marketplace Application. Matej Ďurčo and his colleague Klaus Illmayer contribute to the analysis of the sources that will be harvested by the Marketplace. This task is also crucial for the interoperability aspects, work led by Dieter Van Uytvanck from CLARIN, and to which Sotiris Karampatakis, from Semantic Web Company also contributes. Stefan Probst (ACDH) is working on the front-end development while Tomasz Parkoła, from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PSNC) at the IBC of the Polish Academy of Sciences and DARIAH VCC3 Head, and his colleagues Michał Kozak and Justyna Wytrążek work respectively on back-end development and User Experience (UX) design. The team also includes colleagues from the University of Göttingen, Stefan Buddenbohm, Regine Stein and Philipp Wieder, from the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) and the Society for Scientific Data Processing (GWDG), who are involved in the definition of the user requirements and the design of the conceptual model of the SSH Open Marketplace. Alongside these contributions, Clara Petitfils and Suzanne Dumouchel from Huma-Num (CNRS) are coordinating a task dedicated to “Governance: Population, Curation & Sustainability of the SSH Open Marketplace”. This collective work also relies on the strengths of many other actors, directly involved in the SSHOC project, like CESSDA, TRUST-IT, CNR and FORTH.
How will the SSHOC Marketplace be integrated into EOSC?
In terms of the role envisioned for the SSHOC Marketplace in the EOSC landscape, the following tentative observations can be made:
- The SSHOC Marketplace will become one of the EOSC services and as such will be represented in the EOSC catalogue/marketplace. In the current set up it would be categorised under “sharing & discovery.”
- Given that the SSHOC Marketplace itself is a discovery service (a catalogue), the question arises of potential overlap of data or functionality between the SSHOC Marketplace and the EOSC Catalogue. In all cases, any duplication of provider effort when submitting information about their services and resources must be avoided.
- The SSHOC Marketplace aims to make use of EOSC Federating Core, especially the Federated Identity (AAI) services and the Helpdesk.
Stay in touch! Follow the project to stay up-to-date with developments around the Marketplace: https://www.sshopencloud.eu/
With thanks to Laure Barbot (DARIAH), Clara Petitfils (Huma-Num), Friedel Grant (LIBER) and Marieke Willems (Trust-IT) for contributing to this post.
