The H2IOSC Marketplace is a federated access layer designed to expose, manage, and operate research services and digital resources from the Italian nodes of four European research infrastructures — OPERAS, DARIAH, CLARIN, and E-RIHS — through a single, coherent Marketplace. The platform combines a public-facing environment for discovery and access with a Back-Office supporting infrastructure-level governance, curation, and operational configuration.
A key scientific and technical contribution of the H2IOSC Marketplace lies in enabling cross-infrastructure service orchestration as a first-class capability, formalized early in the project (Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14187534). In this architecture, WSO2 API Manager acts as the API management control plane at Marketplace level, governing service/API lifecycle, access, and policy enforcement.
Moreover, WSO2 Micro Integrator is used to implement executable orchestration projects (workflows) that integrate heterogeneous services and resources into reproducible, shareable research processes.
This approach is explicitly based on an orchestration model, where the Marketplace serves as the central coordination layer for workflow execution and service invocation across multiple infrastructure domains.
Interoperability and catalogue coherence are achieved by combining OAI-PMH harvesting with authenticated REST interfaces, using a controlled data model and curated vocabularies to maintain semantic consistency.
A deliberate operational choice prioritises catalogue consistency by discouraging manual creation of items in favour of harvested/imported records, mitigating the risk of persisting obsolete or non-existing services over time; controlled vocabularies are updated via managed file imports to ensure curated alignment. Identity and access management are implemented via a dedicated Keycloak instance for the Marketplace, which can be federated with external authentication services. This configuration enables autonomous user administration and token handling needed for protected service orchestration, while remaining compatible with federated identity constraints.
By bringing together, in a single operational framework, services originating from four distinct European research infrastructures and by treating orchestration as a native Marketplace capability — implemented through a governance layer (WSO2 API Manager) and executable orchestration projects (WSO2 Micro Integrator) — the H2IOSC Marketplace advances a reusable model for cross-infrastructure Digital Humanities workflows. The resulting approach supports a shared, infrastructure-agnostic entry point for discovery, controlled access, and workflow-driven reuse of services and resources, enabling research processes that are more interoperable, reproducible, and shareable across institutional and infrastructural boundaries.