science

Research Object

Research Object is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Research Object rather than just read about it. In short: In computing, a Research Object is a method for the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information on the Web. The primary goal of the research object approach is to provide a mechanism to associate related resources about a scientific investigation so that they can be shared using a single identifier.

Key takeaways

Research Object belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Research Object to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Research Object from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

In computing, a Research Object is a method for the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information on the Web. The primary goal of the research object approach is to provide a mechanism to associate related resources about a scientific investigation so that they can be shared using a single identifier. As such, research objects are an advanced form of Enhanced publication. Current implementations build upon existing Web technologies and methods including Linked Data, HTTP, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) and the Open Annotation model, as well as existing approaches for identification and knowledge representation in the scientific domain including Digital Object Identifiers for documents, ORCID identifiers for people, and the Investigation, Study, and Assay (ISA) data model.

Principles and motivation The research object approach is primarily motivated by a desire to improve reproducibility of scientific investigations. Central to the proposal is need to share research artifacts commonly distributed across specialist repositories on the Web including supporting data, software executables, source code, presentation slides, presentation videos. Research Objects are not one specific technology but are instead guided by a set of principles. Specifically research objects are guided by three principles of identity, aggregation and annotation

Digital identity - Use unique identifiers as names for things, such as DOIs for publications or data, and ORCID ids for researchers. Data aggregation - Use some form of aggregation to associated related things together that are part of the broader study, investigation etc. so that others may more readily discover those related resources. Annotation - Provide additional metadata about those things, how they relate to each other, their provenance, how they were produced etc.

Communities A number of communities are developing the research object concept.

ROSC W3C activity A W3C community group entitled the Research Objects for Scholarly Communication (ROSC) Community Group was started in April 2013. The community charter states that the goals of the ROSC activity are: "to exchange requirements and expectations for supporting a new form of scholarly communication" The Community Group aims to produce the following types of deliverables:

Use cases for the representation, publishing, and exchange of research objects on the Web Requirements and desiderata distilled from the use cases. A survey of related work on supporting the representation, publishing, and exchange of research objects. Various best practices and guidelines towards a community-wide practice of sharing, citing, and exchanging of research objects

FAIR digital objects The FAIR digital object forum is a community that brings together experts from the FAIR data movement, semantic web, and digital publishing of scholarly work. The first conference on FAIR digital objects led the coalition to ratify the Leiden Declaration on FAIR digital objects. The principles contained in the Leiden Declaration provides a prescriptive framework for infrastructure development around digital research objects. This framework draws from the FAIR data principles and ideas around distributed infrastructure that relies on open protocols to prevent vendor lock-in and ensure access that is "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary". These enable discovery and reuse of Research Objects, including computational workflows for both humans and machines. To promote the uptake and share experiences creating a FAIR Digital Object, case studies have been published showcasing how to create these with the necessary machine-understandable semantic metadata. Specifications like the ISA metadata framework and RO-Crate supporting these ontology-based annotations of high-throughput experiments and analysis workflows, respectively.

Github and Figshare The Mozilla Science Lab have initiated an activity in collaboration with GitHub and Figshare to develop "Code as research object". The initial proposal of the activity is to allow users to transfer code from a GitHub repository to figshare, and provide that code with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), providing a permanent record of the code that can be cited in future publications.

RO-Crate

RO-Crate (Research Objects Crate) is a community initiative started around 2019 that provides an approach to package and aggregate research artefacts with their metadata and relationships. RO-Crate is based on Schema.org annotations in JSON-LD, aiming to establish best practices to formally describe metadata in an accessible and practical way. It has the intent of applying “just enough” Linked Data standards for making research outputs FAIR while also enhancing research reproducibility. It seeks to bridge the complexity gap in the tooling for metadata specifications by following 4 principles:

being conceptually simple and easy to understand for developers; providing strong, easy tooling for integration into community projects; providing a strong and opinionated guide regarding current best practices; adopting de-facto standards that are widely used on the Web. While developing the standard, the base level for simplicity was friendliness to software developers. The team assumed a developer familiar with making Web applications with JSON data, which informed core design choices for the JSON-level documentation approach and RO-Crate serialization. Additionally, in RO-Crate, a referenced contextual entity (e.g. a person identified by ORCID) should always be described within the RO-Crate Metadata File with at least a type and name, even where their persistent identifier (PID) might resolve to further Linked Data. This is so that clients are not required to follow every link for presentation purposes, for instance HTML rendering.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Research Object

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Research Object claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Research Object before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Research Object ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Research Object

In research: Research Object appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Research Object in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Research Object is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Information systems, Scholarly communication, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Research Object outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Research Object in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Research Object means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Research Object out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Research Object in simple terms?

Why does Research Object matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Research Object?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Research Object.