MyGeoHub—A sustainable and evolving geospatial science gateway

Abstract

Science gateways are an integral component of modern collaborative research. They find widespread adoption by research groups to share data, code and tools both amongst collaborators on a project and the broader community. However, not unlike research groups, gateways too, face the vagaries of research funding often resulting in a bleak outlook for their maintenance beyond the original project’s conclusion. We present a sustainability model based on the HUBzero cyberinfrastructure platform that enables multiple research projects to share a single science gateway allowing for their maintenance even after the original funding source has run out. This model brings with it certain other advantages as well; general improvements to the gateway apply to all hosted projects, similar requirements across projects can often be abstracted into new general purpose capabilities for the gateway which feed back into all hosted projects. Such newly developed capabilities can also foster additional research aiding in new funding proposals that can revitalize and jumpstart hosted dormant projects. We describe a specific instance of a HUBzero science gateway, MyGeoHub, that successfully employs this sustainability model to host several geospatial research projects. We also illustrate the specific advantages of this sustainability model in the case of the MyGeoHub gateway that have led to the development of general-purpose data management and visualization software modules that have found use beyond MyGeoHub.