ECCOMAS 2024

An Open Source Project for Dissemination of Computational Solid Mechanics (DCSM)

  • Anciaux, Guillaume (EPFL)

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Academic knowledge is traditionally disseminated by academic journals. However, nowadays, the production of scientific data in any given project exceeds by a vast amount what can be contained in a few journal pages. Reproducible scientific data and publications must be associated to boost scientific collaborations and discoveries. There is today an always increasing pressure coming from universities and funding institutions towards publishing open data. However, the Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM) community, have only limited solutions to curate and share data produced by experiments and simulations. This situation does not favor open science. The DCSM project allowed to develop web platform and an open-source software (Solidipes) to support computational solid mechanics (CSM) scientists in curating and publishing the data accompanying their academic papers. Our approach is intrinsically cloud&web based, is compatible with virtually any CSM data, and was conceived to be extensible and adaptable to broad needs. Numerous library packages dependencies allow observing data (in a web browser), to cure data (structuration and metadata information), and to export to various open-data repositories (e.g. Zenodo). With Solidipes, web interfaces are deployable on personal computers, on Renku instances (maintained by the Swiss Data Science Center) and on dedicated servers. Notably, 3D vizualization in a simple web-browser is now made possible remotely with our approach, even for large datasets. All the produced source code is available on gitlab (https://gitlab.com/dcsm/) with an open license (GPLv3), unit tests, and agile developments strategies. An online documentation for users has been created (https://solidipes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). Overlay scientific journals may largely benefit from this approach: the review/curation is always performed from content deposited on online repositories. DCSM/Solidipes opens the path to data curation and review made by the scientific journals. The Journal of Theoretical Computation and Applied Mechanics (JTCAM) is a Diamond Open Access journal cited as an example in this presentation for using Solidipes to reviewing datasets. High quality reviews and visualization of open datasets shall be shown during the presentation.