This community is characterised by the exploitation of (big) data to analyze social phenomena. It was primarily developed with the development of the SoBigData Research Infrastructure, a distributed, Pan-European, multi-disciplinary research infrastructure aimed at using social mining and big data to understand the complexity of our contemporary, globally-interconnected society. D4Science implements the IT infrastructure offering an integrated ecosystem of tools for data scientists and AI researchers to design and develop big data experiments in social science. The community promotes innovation and cutting-edge science by mobilizing a network of experts, research institutions, and industries. With the FOSSR project the community was further enlarged by bringing in stakeholders focusing on promoting open science practices within the field and encouraging transparency, reproducibility, and the use of open tools and data within social science research. This community faces unique challenges regarding data sensitivity, privacy, and ethics, as social science research often deals with human subjects.
Thos community focused on social phenomena navigates significant research and development hurdles, primarily arising from the sensitive nature of human-centric data and the intricate methodologies required for social analysis. Researchers confront the challenge of extracting meaningful insights from complex, often unstructured, social data while ensuring individual privacy and adhering to stringent ethical guidelines. This includes developing privacy-preserving methods for data collection and analysis and addressing the potential for bias in algorithms and datasets.
Moreover, the community aims to improve the reproducibility and reusability of social science research, fostering a transparent and trustworthy scientific process. This requires tackling the fragmentation of research activities and promoting the sharing of data and methods across diverse teams.
The community also grapples with the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration, as social phenomena often intertwine with various societal, economic, and technological dimensions.
To address these challenges, the community emphasises an approach that integrates ethical data handling practices, promotes the development of robust and transparent analytical processes, and adopts open science principles to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaborative research. The community also focuses on how social bots and fake news affect society.
D4Science provides key advantages to this community through its integrated suite of services and collaborative environment.
Virtual Research Environments (VREs) offer tailored, web-based working environments where researchers can access diverse datasets and tools, fostering efficient and interdisciplinary research.
The Cloud Computing Platform (CCP) enables the execution of complex analytical workflows, while interactive environments like JupyterLab and RStudio support data analysis, coding, and visualisation.
The SoBigData Catalogue provides a centralised repository for resources, promoting resource sharing and discovery.
Collaboration is enhanced through social networking tools and shared workspaces, allowing researchers to connect, share insights, and jointly develop strategies for addressing societal issues.
The Data Publishing Framework ensures that research outputs are accessible and reusable, while the entire platform supports open science practices, encouraging transparency, reproducibility, and the ethical use of social data.
Gateway
FOSSR Gateway
FOSSR si impegna a creare un Open Science Cloud innovativo che permette la raccolta, gestione e analisi dei dati economici e sociali. L?Open Cloud di FOSSR permette di integrare diverse fonti di dati e offre strumenti avanzati per lavorare con tali dati in modo efficiente.
RISIS2 Gateway
The H2020 RISIS2 Project is organised around 3 major dimensions and activities, namely (i) a front end, focusing on users, the ways they access RISIS, work within RISIS and build RISIS user communities. At the core is the RISIS Core facility (WP4). The core facility supports virtual transnational access (WP8) and is accompanied by all the efforts we do to raise awareness, train researchers and interact with them (WP2) and to help them build active user communities (mobilising D4Science VRE, WP7).
SoBigData Gateway
SoBigData is an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life. The aim of SoBigData is to establish the common vision and methodology at the basis of the Research Infrastructure activities. SoBigData establishes which is the nature of data science as a new discipline by enlightening which are the specific facets that make it at the same time interdisciplinary and unique when considering methods, theories and applications.
TerritoriAperti Gateway
Interdisciplinary information system of "Territori Aperti" (see http://territoriaperti.univaq.it) for the prevention and management of natural disasters, as well as for the improvement of the processes of reconstruction and development of the affected areas. The system supports scientific research with the creation of new knowledge and skills through the management and enhancement of data and analytical processes.