Over the past year, representatives from the EaaSI (Emulation-as-a-Service
Infrastructure) program hosted at Yale University and Yale's Institution
for Social and Policy Studies have been working together to investigate
EaaSI's tools as a curation and access service for research data deposited
in the ISPS Data Archive. Emulation promises a novel approach for
reproducing computational research results tied to legacy and proprietary
software; by supporting legacy research software, packaging systems, and
the operating systems and runtimes they depend on, emulation can address
software "rot" and provide access without losing dependencies or rewriting
code. Using Yale's existing collections of "obsolete" software, three
potential paths have so far emerged within EaaSI's program of work:
manually recreating the software environment of deposited data sets using
EaaSI's core interface for managing and delivering emulations via a web
browser; using EaaSI's in-development Universal Virtual Interactor (UVI) to
automatically recommend and render data in already-existing emulated
environments; and packaging data using ReproZip and directly importing
ReproZip packages into an appropriate, contemporary emulated computing
environment. Ongoing discussion has also taken place on how to mesh
Emulation-as-a-Service with ISPS' existing open-source web app YARD (Yale
Application for Research Data). How can researchers and data curators
assist with software preservation and access via emulation at the point of
deposit or review? This presentation will summarize Yale's findings on
these efforts, incorporating quick demonstrations with examples from the
ISPS Data Archive, to illustrate the advantages of Emulation-as-a-Service
for research data management.