Portals

Portals and science gateways are key accessible user interfaces to researchers. They are essential to meet the FAIR data principles and for advancing open science, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, and enhancing the reproducibility of research findings.

At Globus, we have developed many patterns, solutions, and tools to assist in the deployment of a portal tailored to your unique requirements.

Pattern: Modern Research Data Portal (MRDP)

The Modern Research Data Portal is a design pattern for providing secure, scalable, and high performance access to research data. Developed as a collaboration between ESnet and Globus, the pattern is widely used in science portals and gateways to securely deliver data at scale, by separating the business logic and data transport aspects. Many of our Implementations can trace back their designs to the concepts described in our paper, The Modern Research Data Portal: A design pattern for networked, data-intensive science.

Implementations

Globus provides several implementations and libraries to assist in the creation of a data portal that adheres to the Modern Research Data Portal Pattern. We currently divide these tools into three categories: Serverless Portals, our Django-based Portal and Custom Integrations.

Serverless Portals

Serverless portals are client-side JavaScript-based applications that require no managed infrastructure.

We’ve abstracted the creation and maintenance of serverless portals targeted common use cases using GitHub Actions for continuous integration and GitHub Pages for hosting. Our templates provide solutions for data distribution and data discovery and access.

Each solution supports customization including hosting custom content and theming in addition to feature customizations specific to the targeted use case with minimal code and driven by a single JSON configuration file.

Beyond our template repositories, the foundation of our serverless portal solution supports deployment to any host that supports static content (e.g. Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage), the curation of your own GitHub Template Repositories to be used by your institution, and more.

• Serverless Portal Examples on GitHub
• Serverless Portal Templates on GitHub

Learn more about Globus Serverless Portals

Django-based Portal

If you prefer a managed, Python-based solution, the Django Globus Portal Framework is a collection of tools that enable you to rapidly create an easily accessible portal for your data. Currently, The Django Globus Portal Framework functionality focuses on data discovery using Globus Search with integrations to Globus Transfer and further extensibility using common Django application patterns. Tailoring your portal to your data can be done simply by modifying existing bulit-in Bootstrap templates, allowing many levels of customization to suit the required needs.

Custom Integrations

If you are looking to integrate Globus capabilities into an existing application or planning to build your own, Globus offers first-class software developer kits for Python and JavaScript, in addition to service-level APIs outlined in our documentation.