- dr-rg - lists.ogf.org

Dec 2, London - workshop at DCC
by Andreas Aschenbrenner 12 Jan '10

12 Jan '10

Dear members of the OGF repository group, we'd like to give you a brief update on the cluster of DR-RG related events in December: * Dec 2, London - information infrastructure workshop at the Digital Curation Conference (see below) * Dec 8, Oxford - Fedora user group meeting, <http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=13762…> * Dec 9-11, Oxford - Repositories Track at http://www.escience2009.org/ at this year's Digital Curation Conference, we'll look into information/preservation infrastructure. The REPRISE workshop will take place on Dec 2, in the afternoon. contributors include * Kevin Ashley, UK Data Archive * Andy Powell, Eduserv (JISC Information Architecture) * Paolo Missier, University of Manchester (Provenance in SOA, e.g. myExperiment) * Andrew Treloar, Australian National Data Service * California Digital Library (Preservation is not a Place) more information and registration for the workshop at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/ we are glad for your ideas, right now and at the DCC, Andreas

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DCC Workshop: Repository Preservation Infrastructure - Dec 2, London
by Andreas Aschenbrenner 18 Nov '09

18 Nov '09

Dear members of the repositories RG, as discussed at our meeting at OGF26, please find the announcement of a upcoming workshop at the Digital Curation Conference below. best wishes, aA -------------------------- Repository Preservation Infrastructure (REPRISE) (co-organised by the OGF Repositories Group, OGF-Europe, D-Grid/WissGrid) Venue: Digital Curation Conference - Millennium Gloucester Hotel & Conference Centre London Kensington, UK Wednesday 2 December, 2009 - 14:00-17:30 Register Now - http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/ (£45.00 for Associates Network members; £60.00 for non-members) Following on from the successful Repository Curation Service Environments (RECURSE) Workshop at IDCC 2008, this workshop discusses digital repositories and their specific requirements for/as preservation infrastructure, as well as their role within a preservation environment. Digital repositories in various shapes and sizes are the basis for management and long-term retention of data (e.g. text publications, research data, multimedia). Some repositories have existed over a number of years, and have had to adapt to changes in their organisational and technological contexts. For example, organisational changes or cooperation across repositories may demand the translation of meta/data between the diverse contexts. Their experiences give insight into the kind of pro-active flexibility needed to sustain the repository and adapt to changes. This workshop aims to tap into these experiences and discuss technical features and shared services (beyond format registries, for example) for an open repository environment. Discussion points: open repository environment, preservation infrastructure, interoperability of repository services, (automatic) meta/data creation and mediation. Speakers at the event include: • Andreas Aschenbrenner, SUB Goettingen, WissGrid - Curation Infrastructure for Research Data • Ross King, Austrian Institute of Technology - The Planets Interoperability Framework • John Kunze, California Digital Library - Preservation is not a Place • Paolo Missier, University of Manchester - Provenance in distributed environments to establish trust • Andy Powell, Eduserv - Open and Social Information Environments • Andrew Treloar, Australian National Data Service - The Australian National Data Service and loosely-coupled verb-based architectures The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards. The group is currently collecting metadata use-cases in order to survey metadata handling in various DR communities, the groups will also carry out an architecture study highlighting the architecture of several digital repositories in order to identify the potential for exploitation of existing standards as well as the need for new or revised standards. The workshop will be held at the 5th International Digital Curation Conference "Moving to Multi-Scale Science: Managing Complexity and Diversity" 2-4 December 2009 Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington, London - http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/

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Metadata case studies - early draft
by Andreas Aschenbrenner 12 Jul '09

12 Jul '09

Dear members of the OGF repository group, please find attached a first stab at collating the diverse case studies of digital repositories we have already encountered during our events. The perspectives on digital repositories are very diverse. We attempted to better scope the field to facilitate a coherent discussion. The assumed position may not resonate with all of you, so please feed back your position and add your own case studies! With all your input we can hopefully converge towards a common OGF position on digital repositories. best wishes, Andi ps please note that we deliberately moved from the term "use case" to "case studies". Use cases are usually some abstract snapshots of particular aspects of a new system. In this document, however, we attempted to benefit from all the input you have already given in the DR-RG meetings, and underline that we are not building something new but merge existing experiences.

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OGF26 summary + future sessions
by Andreas Aschenbrenner 29 May '09

29 May '09

Dear members of the OGF Digital Repositories Research Group, thanks to all who participated at the discussions at OGF26 last week. Please find a quick write-up of my impressions from the session. It is hard to squeeze all the issues into just a few sentences, but please do not hesitate to add / correct the lines below. We intend to publish this text, so please make sure to contribute. We hope to see you and all those who could not participate this time at future events. Also, we are still collecting metadata scenarios and are looking forward to your contributions. These scenarios are the basis for the OGF repository work. best wishes, a -------------------------------------- The latest meeting of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) took place at OGF26. The conference saw a much lower participation than earlier OGF's, yet there were 14 participants from various backgrounds contributing to a lively discussion. In fact, we had to stop mid-sentence, but will continue the discussion at upcoming events. As future venues for the DR-RG were suggested * Digital Curation Conference, London, 1st week of December * IEEE e-Science, Oxford, 2nd week of December The OGF26 session featured two presentations from Jane Mandelbaum (Library of Congress) and Richard Marciano (UNC). A common theme were the interoperability requirements for metadata (e.g. on item and collection level) to enable interaction between different communities, organisational contexts, and systems. Herewith just a few points that were picked up during the discussion. Slides can be found http://forge.gridforum.org/sf/docman/do/listDocuments/projects.dr-rg/docman… Jane Mandlebaum from the Library of Congress gave an impression of the developments in one of the most experienced fields in information science. For decades discussion among cultural heritage institutions were dominated by the idea of the "perfect set" of metadata that is globally applied, by information managers and users alike. This notion of global unification by and large failed. Jane described how future information environments are likely to allow for variations in metadata standards and encourage participation rather than enforce it. In these environments, infrastructure provides the tools to mediate between different data, to simplify metadata creation and to raise its quality. (Seemingly simple things can turn out utterly complex: e.g. how to convert existing long titles of history videos into short titles as required by YouTube.) This point resonated with other participants who also agreed that automatic metadata creation/conversion, and encouraging early metadata creation were amongst the key opportunities in their communities. Richard Marciano from the iRODS team DICE focused on policies for collection management. In a talk seeded with the multiplicity of experiences from iRODS installations, Richard identified standardised mechanisms for describing collection policies (e.g. replication criteria, legal constraints) as a key challenge for the repository community. Without collection policy standards, important contextual information may be lost when migrating or exchanging collections between federated repositories. All participants - cross-community activities in national grids (e.g. D-Grid), at national service centers (e.g. NGS), as well as in enterprise environments - agreed that requirements of users or user communities differ greatly and need to be addressed individually (i.e. dealing with a requirement once it's there, not creating the perfect set, or the perfect service upfront). It is the information environment between dedicated repositories that enables the necessary flexibility over time through mediation, interoperation, added-value services, etc. OGF Digital Repositories Research Group http://www.ogf.org/gf/group_info/view.php?group=dr-rg

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Community Metadata process standards
by neil p chue hong 27 May '09

27 May '09

Hi, enjoyed the talks at this mornings session at OGF. I thought the following piece of work might be interesting to add to the discusssion: The CARMEN project from the UK has created something called MINI: Minimum Information about a Neuroscience Investigation. "This framework represents the formalised opinion of the CARMEN consortium and its associates, and identifies the minimum reporting information required to support the use of electrophysiology in a neuroscience study, for submission to the CARMEN system. These guidelines are a work in progress and will evolve." http://www.carmen.org.uk/standards They identified that metadata collection was an issue, and have proposed a way this might be mitigated for their community. chheers, neil -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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