An Empirical Evidence Of Barriers In A Big Data Infrastructure

BACKGROUND: Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a well-known e-infrastructure provides open data to study the future anthropogenic climate change. Data are accessed by the research communities to produce sophisticated simulations of the earth system and to study the impact of climate change. Although these e-infrastructures provide relevant data, little is known about the User eXperience (UX) and the issues that users face during their interaction with these infrastructures. AIM: This article presents an investigation about the issues that researchers (end-users) may face while interacting with an e-Science infrastructure and consequently, it elucidates obstacles to access required data. METHOD: Supported by Action Research (AR) methodology, this study was carried out in the context of ESGF by analysing different types of stakeholders especially users and the help desk. Based on Grounded Theory (GT), in a deeply qualitative analysis, we examined 655 e-mail threads that were sent to ESGF help desk as there were questions asked by end-users to access the data served by the e-infrastructure. RESULTS: The outcomes revealed that questions related to workflow in the e-infrastructure were the bottlenecks that mostly impact the UX. Based on the classification scheme of the barriers that is derived as a result, after applying GT, we classified such bottlenecks and made suggestions to improve UX in e-Science infrastructure. CONCLUSIONS: According to our knowledge, this is the first study focused on discussing UX in e-Science infrastructure as it explains the barriers that limit and delay the research process of scientists while they interact with the e-infrastructure. Henceforth, the full benefit of the data projects hosted by the e-infrastructure is not realized. If these barriers would be treated using a joint-strategy initiated by the stakeholders of an e-infrastructure, the research process for the users will be faster and they will have a better UX.RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTSAn overview of the user experience (UX) with the e-Science infrastructures is demonstrated in this study in the context of a well-known Climate e-Science infrastructure: Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF)Action Research (AR) is applied to find the current state of UX with the user support unit of the ESGF e-Science infrastructure from various data sourcesGrounded Theory (GT) is applied in the 'Evaluation' phase of AR to find out the bottlenecks that researchers face while interacting with the e-Science infrastructuresThese bottlenecks were then classified using GT, this classification shows that the users have problems in accessing and downloading data to perform e-researchFinally, recommendations are made to tackle the bottlenecks found in the e-infrastructure