Building science gateways for humanities content poses new challenges to the science gateway community. Compared with science gateways devoted to scientific content, humanities-related projects usually require 1) processing data in various formats, such as text, image, video, etc., 2) constant public access from a broad audience, and therefore 3) reliable security, ideally with low maintenance. Many traditional science gateways are monolithic in design, which makes them easier to write, but they can be computationally inefficient when integrated with numerous scientific packages for data capture and pipeline processing. Since these packages tend to be single-threaded or nonmodular, they can create traffic bottlenecks when processing large numbers of requests. Moreover, these science gateways are usually challenging to resume development on due to long gaps between funding periods and the aging of the integrated scientific packages. In this paper, we study the problem of building science gateways for humanities projects by developing a service-based architecture, and present two such science gateways: the Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) – a science gateway focusing on image analysis for digital surrogates of historical motion picture film, and SnowVision - a science gateway for studying pottery fragments in southeastern North America. For each science gateway, we present an overview of the background of the projects, and some unique challenges in their design and implementation. These two science gateways are deployed on XSEDE’s Jetstream academic clouding computing resource and are accessed through web interfaces. Apache Airavata middleware is used to manage the interactions between the web interface and the deep-learning-based (DL) backend service running on the Bridges graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster.
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How to Position Your Gateway for Success: Ten Good Practices
Science gateways have gained a lot of traction in the last twenty years, as evidenced by projects such as the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) and the Center of Excellence on Science Gateways (SGX3) in the US, The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and its platforms in Australia, and the projects around Virtual Research Environments in Europe. A few mature frameworks have evolved with their different strengths and foci and have been taken up by a larger community such as Hubzero, Tapis, and Galaxy. However, even when gateways are built on successful frameworks, they continue to face the challenges of ongoing maintenance costs and how to meet the ever-expanding needs of the community they serve with enhanced features. It is not uncommon that gateways with compelling use cases are nonetheless unable to get past the prototype phase and become a full production service, or if they do, they don't survive more than a couple of years. While there is no guaranteed pathway to success, it seems likely that for any gateway there is a need for a strong community and/or solid funding streams to create and sustain its success. With over twenty years of examples to draw from, we present in this paper ten factors common to successful and enduring gateways that effectively serve as best practices for any new or developing gateway.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2231406
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10533720
- Publisher / Repository:
- Zenodo
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Science Gateways Good Practices Sustainability
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Right(s):
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10034573
