Research Box Explained: Shareable Experiment Data

Experiment results too often sit in local folders, spreadsheets and ad-hoc formats that only the people who made them understand. When another team or another institution needs them, nobody can compare them, reproduce them or add them up. Research Box packages each experiment as one self-describing archive, on the RO-Crate open standard. It holds the methodology, the infrastructure it ran on, the raw data and results, and a provenance chain recording who ran it, when, and on what.

Create the archive with the command-line tool, and the schema guides you through each section. It is validated, with its checksums verified, before you submit it and again when it arrives. Then compare results in the web portal. Research Box was first deployed as the experiment datastore for ITEA GreenCode.

Partner institutions across Europe submit validated archives, each tagged as a baseline or a refactored run, and compare energy consumption across projects, code versions and infrastructure. Any team whose experiment data has to be packaged, shared and compared across institutions can deploy Research Box, with a schema for its own domain. Reach out, and we will show you what it can do with yours.