Science clusters
Summary
With the goal of overcoming the fragmentation of training resources across Research Infrastructures (RIs) and the Science Clusters, the mTeSS-X project will enhance the existing open-source TeSS platform - developed by ELIXIR specifically for building aggregator training portals, and currently used in ELIXIR and PaNOSC training portals - to natively support federation. Such a fully-featured open-source multi-tenanted training platform is expected to be an innovation for building a federation of portals to help break down barriers between thematic communities, promote a more cohesive European research community, and promote FAIR and open training.
The project strives to support the federation of training catalogues using a multi-tenancy approach, and enabling cross-instance content exchange. This will allow RIs and their communities to maintain tailored catalogues with distinct identities, while simultaneously benefiting from a shared global pool of resources.
Challenge
Open Science project, Open Science Service, Cross-domain/Cross-RI
Many RIs and EOSC projects have limited training catalogue capability beyond sparse, outdated lists on web pages, while cross-portal exchange has been discussed but not practised. Fragmentation of resources hampers the reuse of valuable training materials and limits the dissemination of events and learning pathways. Additionally, the need to customise and maintain separate portals for each RI results in duplicated efforts and inefficiencies, reducing the overall sustainability of training resources in the European research ecosystem. The main challenge of the project is thus to enable the federation of catalogues, support cross-discipline training resource exchange and celebrate and maintain catalogue unique identity.
Solution
mTeSS-X will extend the TeSS platform by introducing multi-tenancy, allowing multiple communities to maintain distinct training catalogues within a shared instance, while preserving their individual identities. Each community will have a tailored view of the global catalogue (with custom look, features, content and integrations with other services), giving the appearance of a standalone portal, while benefiting from shared content and automated harvesting. This means that, for instance, in a Science Cluster portal, RIs would retain their own catalogue identity while promoting cross-RI, and/or cross-cluster sharing. In this respect, it will be demonstrated that merging the ELIXIR and PaN-Training portals into a single managed instance can present them as independent portals while still benefiting from shared content.
The project will also implement TeSS-X plugins to facilitate seamless content exchange between catalogues implemented as separate instances, enabling communities that run their own portals to participate in cross-catalogue resource sharing. This innovative approach will optimise both portal operation and training material dissemination across disciplines.
Mixing and matching these setups will enable cross-disciplinary training knowledge exchange, and will optimise portal operation, while serving training providers and consumers.
Scientific Impact
By fostering the federation of interoperable training catalogues, mTeSS-X will significantly enhance the findability, accessibility, and reuse of high-quality training resources. The project will improve the sustainability of training portals by reducing operational duplication and enabling resource-sharing across portals. The adoption of FAIR principles and open training practices will ultimately lead to a more efficient and impactful training ecosystem, benefiting both training providers and consumers: training providers will have their training resources propagated across catalogues and disciplines. Training consumers will have the availability of a much higher amount of FAIR training resources across scientific disciplines.
Principal investigator
Carole is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the Joint Head of Node of ELIXIR-UK, the national node of the European Research Infrastructure for Life Sciences (ELIXIR), and spearheads several of ELIXIR’s flagship services including WorkflowHub, RDMKit, and the TeSS training portal. She participates in many EOSC projects including EOSC-Life, EuroScienceGateway, EVERSE, EOSC-ENTRUST and FAIR-IMPACT. Carole led data management for the IBISBA Research Infrastructure, and nationally co-leads Health Data Research UK’s Federated Analytics programme.
