Container Strategies for Data & Software Preservation that Promote Open Science (DASPOS workshop)

In the last two days o2r team member Daniel participated in a workshop organized by the project “Data and Software Preservation Open Science” (DASPOS) at the University of Notre Dame, USA. It was organized in an excellent fashion and in perfect amenities by the Center for Research Computing (CRC at the University of Notre Dame.

The workshop title “Container Strategies for Data & Software Preservation that Promote Open Science” fits perfectly with our own project goals, so Daniel was not surprised learn about a lot of great initiatives and projects. A great group of researchers and librarians, mostly from the US, presented diverse topics almost all of which had one connection or another with o2r. The general connecting feature between all participants were (Docker) containers and the interest in preservation. Different approaches were presented in hands-on sessions, for example ReproZip, Umbrella and the NDS Dashboard. You can check the full schedule and participant list for details.

A few highlights from Daniel’s perspective were the shared understanding that a common language and terms would be needed going forward when containerisation is applied more widely for openness and transparency of research. But at the same time, and certainly at the current point in time of implementations, diversity is good and some amount of re-doing existing “features” is unavoidable.

You can find Daniel’s presentation (also on SlideShare), as well as all other’s slides and other (reading) material, on the Open Science Framework (OSF) website. The presentations were recorded and you can watch Daniel’s talk as well as all the others:

Daniel would like to thank the DASPOS team for the invitation and the excellent filming and transcribing. It was a great experience to meet the leaders in the field. The workshop was an awesome opportunity to share the o2r vision and to learn about other projects, ideas and concepts at this stage of our project.