# Describing, saving and analysing research workflows: the MEMORIA project

Iwona Dudek

► To cite this version:

Iwona Dudek. Describing, saving and analysing research workflows: the MEMORIA project. Share - Publish - Store - Preserve. Methodologies, Tools and Challenges for 3D Use in Social Sciences and Humanities, 2019, 10.5281/zenodo.3258316. hal-04996955

HAL Id: hal-04996955

https://hal.science/hal-04996955v1

Submitted on 19 Mar 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

## 4.3. Describing, Saving and Analysing Research Workflows: the MEMORIA Project<fnref n="24" />

### 4.3.1. General Presentation and Features

Knowledge management systems are today part of many research protocols where they act as a powerful means to share, use, organize and maintain knowledge and information. They remain, however, tricky to apply in the specific context of heritage science where workflows include a long tail of subjective human decisions, of non-explicit research protocols, of poorly formalised pieces of knowledge, of undocumented, non-reproducible, intuitive interpretations, etc. Yet the heritage science community has witnessed over the past decades the emergence of huge quantities of digital outputs, either following massive digitization efforts, or as a result of the growing capacity of actors to produce digital-born material. How can this move be supported in terms of reproducibility, reusability and cross-examination of results if research protocols remain non-formalised one-shot efforts?

Conceived and developed by UMR MAP with a financial help from the Research Department of French Ministry of Culture (DREST), the MEMORIA research program<fnref n="25" /> aims at researching a practical solution for the formalization and intersubjective description of research workflows. This initiative is based on the idea that, beyond metadata describing outputs themselves, the scientific community concerned is awaiting the means to ensure their verifiability, reproducibility and comparability.

<footnote n="24">²⁴ The PDF of the project's presentation during the PARTHENOS 2nd workshop is accessible under the following address: <http://memoria.gamsau.archi.fr/projet/pdf/Memoria_MapGamsau_IDudek.pdf>, I. Dudek, *Store Preserve Visualize - The MEMORIA project*, 2019</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ MEMORIA project website <http://memoria.gamsau.archi.fr/projet/objectives.php?lang=en></footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

The project's vision is that an *output*<fnref n="26" /> should be seen as the ultimate result of a *series of activities* that are as vital to describe and preserve as the output itself. In other words, the underlying objective of the project is to describe not only a result – *i.e.*, a resource, digital or not - but also its production history, *i.e.* the manner how each particular result was achieved.

The initiative hence started with a significant knowledge elicitation effort thanks to which an overall 263 activities (distributed in five groups) were identified, that correspond to the competences of the staff involved in the workgroup discussions<fnref n="27" />. Given this, no claim is made that the MEMORIA's structured list of activities is universal - it only fits the needs of those who created it. (Figure 20)

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 20: Hierarchical organisation of MAP-Gamsau activities inside groups (data collection and acquisition, data filtering and treatment).</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ An output is resource, usually digital or digital-born, resulting from a research activity. An output can be a simple document or a set of documents (a screenshot, a 3D model, a video). cf. *MEMORIA* vocabulary, <http://memoria.gamsau.archi.fr/projet/vocabulary.php?lang=en&ordre=beta&term output></footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ cf. Dudek, J.Y. Blaise, L. De Luca, L. Bergerot, N. Renaudin, *How Was This Done? An Attempt at Formalising and Memorising a Digital Asset's Making-of*. Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on Digital Heritage 2015, Vol. 2, Assessment of Methodologies and Tools in DH, IEEE Computer Society, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-5090-0254-2, pp. 343-346, <http://memoria.gamsau.archi.fr/projet/pdf/DCH2015.pdf></footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Each output can be described as the result of a series of activities that form a research workflow, a *process* as illustrated in Figure 21. Naturally, some activities we all carry out whilst analysing a given dataset, or producing this or that end-result, can be iterative or repetitive – this is part of the underlying model, and transferred through the visual language developed for the project.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 21:** Illustration of how activities (represented by circles, with colours differentiating groups of activities) can be combined to form a process. The top arched connectors and bottom straight underscores identify segments that are respectively iterative and repetitive segments. The figure shows the three successive processes that had to be conducted during the project's "knowledge elicitation" step in order to identify, define, structure and exemplify the activities.</figcaption></figure>

Each activity (i.e., each circle in Figure 21) can aggregate a variety of core information such as tools, people involved, sources, duration of the activity, etc. (Figure 22)
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 22:** Each activity keeps track of institutional framework in which the work took place (i.e., creator(s), organization(s)), primary sources used and expertise(s), outputs if they result from the activity, techniques and tools used during the activity (instruments, software, ...), duration of the activity, descriptive information concerning the activity, as well as recurrent or repetitive character of the activity.</figcaption></figure>

At the end of the day, resources whatsoever (e.g., 3D model, collections of charts) should be tagged with a set of descriptors (Figure 23) in order to trace all activities mobilized to produce them, and, therefore, in order to reveal the cognitive approach that led to their production.
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Figure 23: A “film” metaphor to sum up the completion of a resource description - example of an output.</figcaption></figure>

A critical ambition of the project is - in line with some of the distinctive research accomplishments of the MAP research team - to develop, experiment and evaluate visual languages as means to synthesise and share pieces of information on a non-verbal level. As a consequence, we made an endeavour to design visual interfaces providing, on one hand, access to the results of queries on all resources (sorted by object of study, project, production process, etc.), and, on the other hand, showing the evolution of methods, techniques and tools used over time, as well as types of activities mobilised to produce a given resource. (Figure 24)
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Figure 24: Graphic principle of the MEMORIA interface (search mode).</figcaption></figure>

This is definitely a costly effort – an effort some will consider superfluous, but from our point of view it is a vital aspect of any innovative, potent and eye-catching information system, and a key point when wanting to reduce the user's cognitive load and to facilitate reasoning at analysis time.

To sum it up, scientists and academics have over the last decades been the witnesses of a profound shift in research practices, induced by the growing influence of “digital technologies” at large. One of the consequences of the introduction and use of those technologies (and methods) are changes in research pragmatics (e.g., a renewal of workflows, a renewal of data exchange and publication paradigms/practices). In the specific context of human and social sciences also, actors have acquired new tools that strongly influence their research practices. Yet the very nature of the cognitive processes concerned (and in particular the role of individual, somehow subjective interpretation steps) invites us to look into the consequences of the above shift with a sharp eye. With new opportunities often come new issues, new difficulties, and new hazards.
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

The MEMORIA project addresses some of these issues in an application field where constraints in relation with heritage sciences meet practices, protocols, tools stemming from the engineering and information sciences. One of the key ethical issues<fnref n="28" /> is the influence of digital technologies – supposedly positive – on our capacity to perpetuate and transmit to future generations pieces of data as well as elements of knowledge. The mantra behind the MEMORIA project is that what needs to be formalized, shared, transmitted is not only result of a research process, but the result along with the production process (if wanting to make of it a meaningful, reusable scientific document ...).

### 4.3.2. Actual Limitations and Suggested Improvements

The MEMORIA project's ambition should not be confused with objectives of initiatives that address issues such as interoperability, standardisation, long term archiving (e.g., data migration, software/hardware emulation), sharing and publishing data collections, etc. In the same way, the project is clearly not about instrumenting connections between existing tools and platforms, but rather about helping researchers and analyst to understand one another, to exchange on methodologies, whatever tools and platforms they happen to work with.

The project's main objective is bringing to the fore and evaluating a new methodological approach to the description, storage and analysis of research workflows *per se*, and this very ambition sets the intrinsic boundaries – and limitations – of the initiative.

Another intrinsic limitation that should be pointed out is the fact that the MEMORIA's structured list of activities is not an all-terrain list - it only fits the needs of those who created it, through an intense elicitation effort. Hence, no claim is made that the initiative will result in a definitive, exhaustive, standardised closed list of activities. The aim is rather to exemplify how a given community can build such a list, and update it as methods and technologies evolve.

<footnote n="28">²⁸ cf. I. Dudek, J.Y. Blaise, *MEMORIA – la préservation des processus d'étude comme enjeu éthique*, [in] La diffusion numérique des données en SHS, Guide des bonnes pratiques éthiques et juridiques, Ed. V. Ginouvès, I. Gras, collection DIGITALES, Presses Universitaires de Provence, Aix-Marseille Université 2018, ISBN: 9791032001790, pp. 231-240, <https://hal-amu.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01903040>, <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01902564/document></footnote>
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

At this stage, MEMORIA is still an ongoing research and development initiative and should be seen as work in progress in terms of implementation and in terms of evaluation on a significant quantity of use cases. The issue here is not only finalising a full-scale robust Internet-based information system, but reaching a point where its acceptability, its workload for users, and ultimately its efficiency and usefulness can be assessed.

In that sense we are now planning a new development of the programme, in the context of the SESAMES research initiative (ANR funded programme), with the aim of exemplifying a series of use cases for which the approach can be beneficial. The focus will be put on addressing a frequent issue in heritage science: the imperative of formalising and keeping trace of the various steps that lead from “premises” (archaeological relics, sources) to an assertive 3D virtual reconstruction – an end line product that remains today most often un-associated with interpretation processes.

This experimentation will be carried out in connection with other teams, and in particular with a team of archaeologists (UMR CITERES 7324 LAT). This should help us to question and evaluate the approach in a twofold way: enrichment or adaptation of activities, and feedback from researchers across various disciplines in particular on the usability of the system.