Management of Computational Notebooks

Notebooks, specifically Jupyter notebooks (but also notebooks from platforms such as RStudio) are generating a great deal of excitement and are potentially a significant step forward in terms of reproducibility, education, code documentation and academic publishing. A recent paper found nearly 1.2 Million unique notebooks based on searches through github.

More recently the deployment of resources such as JupyterHub, myBinder and EGI notebooks mean that notebooks can be deployed on a cloud and hence obviates issues with installed libraries. One potential result of this is that it would represent the easiest pathway for users to use cloud computing resources for research which could transform the use of such resources. It is clear that frameworks such as EOSC and the US National Data Service will make extensive use of notebooks and their offerings affected by them. 

There is an extensive body of research on Notebooks (for example the JupyterCon conference series) but the expertise of the RDA members can make important contributions in this area. The overall objectives are to initially consider the following :- 

• Citation of notebooks that conform to Software Citation standards,

• Integration of notebooks with data sources (e.g. EGI DataHub or more abstractly to data sources with a PID),

• Deploying notebook services on large Scientific computational platforms. 

• Long-term preservation of notebooks without losing functionality.

This will be carried out with some relatively short introductions to the above topics followed by break out groups on the above topics to consider what concrete steps can be made in this within the RDA, e.g. through the formation of an IG and/or WG’s.