摘要: Modern interactive tools for data analysis and visualisation are designed to expose their functionalities as
a service through the Web. We present in this paper a Web API (SWIRRL) that allows Virtual Research
Environments (VREs) to easily integrate such tools in their websites and re-purpose them to their users. The
API deals, on behalf of the clients, with the underlying complexity of allocating and managing resources
within a target cloud platform. By combining storage and containerised services, offering analysis notebooks
and other visualisation software, the API creates dedicated working sessions on-demand, which can be
accessed collaboratively. Thanks to the API’s support for workflow execution, SWIRRL workspaces can be
automatically populated with data of interest collected from external data providers. The system keeps track
of updates and changes affecting the data and the tools by adopting versioning and standard provenance
technologies. Users are provided with interactive controls enabling traceability and recovery actions, including
the possibility of creating executable snapshots of their environments. SWIRRL is built in cooperation with
two research infrastructures in the field of solid earth science and climate data modeling. We report on the
particular adoptions and use cases.