Implementation of a Federated Information System by Means of Reuse of Research Data Archived in Research Data Repositories

Abstract

At universities, research data is increasingly stored in research data repositories according to a data management plan (DMP) and thus made available for further use. The challenge of reusing hundreds, thousands, or millions of data sets is to obtain an overview of the data in a short period of time and to search through all the data. The high variability of the formats used to store research data requires a new approach to data reusability that focuses on the visualisation and searchability of archived research data, which can also be combined with each other. In this article, we present a practical DMP that describes how information systems can be created on demand by reusing research data archived in research data repositories and how these systems can be merged into a federated information system. As a result, in our projects, information systems have been created in minutes or a couple of hours with few resources. The initial effort to create a federated system remains; however, this allows federated searches to be performed. Extending a federated system to include other information systems can then be accomplished by making a few configurations and manageable adjustments to the source code.