From Preserving Data to Preserving Research: Curation of Process and Context

In the domain of eScience, investigations are increasingly collaborative. Most scientific and engineering domains benefit from building on top of the outputs of other research: By sharing information to reason over and data to incorporate in the modelling task at hand.This raises the need to provide means for preserving and sharing entire eScience workflows and processes for later reuse. It is required to define which information is to be collected, create means to preserve it and approaches to enable and validate the re-execution of a preserved process. This includes and goes beyond preserving the data used in the experiments, as the process underlying its creation and use is essential.This tutorial thus provides an introduction to the problem domain and discusses solutions for the curation of eScience processes.