Introduction
EOSC Resource Catalogue is the heart of the EOSC Future ecosystem. It provides both data and functionality to register, maintain, administer and share resources onboarded by various providers. Moreover, it’s the point of reference for all EOSC Future components that provide added value to this information and help in making all this data and services searchable and accessible using various tools, both for researchers and end users.
The EOSC Resource Catalog is the result of merging the EOSC Service Catalogue (including data source services) and the EOSC Research Product Catalogue, together with the related list of EOSC providers. These are populated independently, as the resource onboarding process they support differs due to the different nature of the resources they manage, but their resources are interrelated. They can acquire metadata records from similar catalogues located within RI/clusters/other organizations premises or, in the case of research products, directly from the data sources. As a result, the EOSC Resource catalogue contains metadata about services, data sources, and research products, together with semantic relationships between them, highlighting the nature of the connection between services and products (e.g. hosted By, generated By, etc.)
This document describes the high-level service architecture for an EOSC Resource Catalog service and presents the main integration and usage use cases for interacting with it. It describes the current status of the components that consist the EOSC Resource Catalog and its relations and it proposes interfaces as guidelines to be followed to achieve and/or extend the interoperability between these components necessary for the system to evolve to the EOSC Future requirements. Moreover, it proposes functionality that is required for the EOSC Resource Catalog to interact with other EOSC Future ecosystem components, such as Marketplace, Accounting, Monitoring etc, and to be able to disseminate information about resources to external collaborators and teams, such as thematic and regional data/services catalogs .
The EOSC Resource Catalogue maintains an up-to-date map of the EOSC resources, as offered by EOSC providers, which are organizations eligible (thus authorized) to publish EOSC resources in the Catalogue. The types of EOSC resources are defined by the EOSC Resource Description Framework Interoperability Framework (WP3), which today includes: Providers, Services (Data Sources as an explicit subtype) as for guidelines defined by the Provider & Resource Description Template, and Research Products, as for guidelines defined by the OpenAIRE Guidelines.
More specifically, the EOSC Resource Catalogue consists of:
EOSC Providers Portal: the portal enables the front-end functionality for the registration of EOSC Providers, organizations entitled to publish their resources via the EOSC Catalogue, and offers them capabilities to onboard and manage EOSC resources. It also offers the Provider dashboard, where representatives from provider organizations have a detailed view on their offerings in the EOSC portal as well as various usage statistics on their resources. Finally, it offers to members of the onboarding team of the EOSC portal the functionality to manage the EOSC portal catalogue entries, i.e., manage the onboarding process of providers that apply to list their resources in the portal, audit on the onboarded resources, etc.
EOSC Service Catalogue: the component offers the underlying storage functionality and the interoperability tools for the programmatic access, registration, manage (CRUD) of providers, services, and catalogues. It also offers the necessary API functionality for the interoperability of service catalogues from individual providers or aggregators (e.g., thematic, or regional catalogues) with the EOSC portal. Modifications to the entities maintained in the Service Catalogue are synchronized with the EOSC Research Graph, which aggregates the complete set of entities and their relationships in the EOSC portal.
EOSC Research Product Catalogue (EOSC-RG): the component offers capabilities to populate and access a Knowledge Graph, where (i) nodes represent instances of the different EOSC resource types (e.g. services and products), the EOSC Resource Providers, and contain information the EOSC Interoperability Frameworks (to which EOSC Interoperability Frameworks the resources are compliant to), and (ii) relationships represent the semantic associations between them.
Regarding service/resource onboarding and management, EOSC Resource Catalogue should provide functionality for:
- providers, to register to the EOSC to become eligible to the onboarding of resources
- providers, to onboard their services/research products into the EOSC Service Data
- providers, to view the list of services registered in the EOSC portal and perform a variety of actions such as activate, deactivate, view usage statistics,
- EOSC Portal Onboarding Team (EPOT) members, to manage the onboarding process (approve, reject an application), manage the catalogue of providers and services and audit the validity of the catalogue entries.
- providers of catalogues, to add entire regional or thematic catalogs to the EOSC ecosystem
Regarding resources discovery and access, EOSC Resource Catalogue should provide functionality for:
- APIs to search, browse, and navigate the EOSC Resources and Providers
- APIs to broker/route metadata information to service providers and any other EOSC future component that uses such data.
High-level Architecture
Figure 1 gives a diagrammatic overview of the Resource Catalog, its main components and the ways they interact with each other and with external components and users
Figure 1. High level architecture
EOSC Service Catalogue : EOSC Service Catalogue is the repository component offering the necessary programmatic interfaces for the addition, modification, and access to information regarding providers, resources and user activity collected in EOSC portal
EOSC Providers Portals: EOSC Providers Portals components offer front-end functionality to users representing a Provider organization, who wish to onboard their organization and onboard resources in the EOSC Resource Catalogue, to manage and customize the way offerings are presented to end users and finally to gain insights on a multitude of usage statistics, user-generated events and statistics collected.
EOSC Research Product Catalogue: The Research Product Catalogue is a public and open access collection of metadata and semantic links (~1Bi) between research-related entities collected from data sources (2400+) or inferred from PDFs (14Mi+). Entities are research products, namely articles (124M+), datasets (14Mi+), software (200K+), and other research products (8Mi+), organizations (250,000), funders (~25), funding streams, projects (3.5Mi+), research communities (7), and data sources (~80K).