RO-Crate for Testbeds: Automated Packaging of Experimental Results

Result reproducibility, a cornerstone of open science, not only enhances transparency and trustworthiness in research findings but facilitates collaboration and accelerates scientific progress by enabling other researchers to validate and build upon existing results. In computer science, testbeds are widely used research infrastructures to create scientific results. Scientists create experiments in these testbeds typically as one-off setups to answer specific questions. The outcomes of this process are individualized experiments with a wide variety of approaches, structures, formats, or documentation. These properties hamper effective experiment validation or reuse. This paper proposes a concept to structure and document the outcome of testbed-hosted experiments. We describe our implementation that packages the results of a specific testbed framework, called plain orchestrating service (pos), in the standardized RO-Crate format and annotates metadata to the result files. The metadata includes information such as authorship, affiliations, software setup, hardware setup, energy consumption, and network topology. Furthermore, we demonstrate our implementation with an example measurement and publish the packaged RO-Crate to the open repository Zenodo. Our approach enables researchers to effectively organize, share, and reproduce experimental data, promoting transparency and collaboration.