EPSRC DReSNet: Digital Repositories in e-Science

Kick-off meeting

Culture Lab, University of Newcastle

November 4th, 2008

Presentations

Mark Hedges and Tobias Blanke (King's College London): "Targets of DReSNet and overview of a research agenda for Digital Repositories in e-Science and e-Research"

The first presentation by Mark Hedges presented the Network’s aims and objectives and reported on activities so far:

• Mark presented at OGF 21 in Barcelona at the workshop on Digital Repositories.
• We are in negotiations with the organizers of OGF Europe to plan for a follow-up workshop at OGF 23 in Catania in 2009.
• Together with OGF Europe, OMII UK and SUB Goettingen, we will hold a workshop RECURSE at DCC conference 2008 in Edinburgh.
• Mark and Tobias are organizing workshops on 'Federated Access Management and Digital Repositories' for JISC.
• Mark and Tobias have been invited to give a tutorial about Digital Repositories as Data Ecosystems at the next IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies: http://dest2009.debii.curtin.edu.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=vi...
• We organize a special session at the 4thIEEE e-Science conference in Indianapolis: http://dresnet.net/ieee-escience-2008-cfp

Lydia Horstman has been appointed as the project coordinator

The RECURSE workshop was discussed as the next major event: It is jointly supported by OGF-Europe and DReSNet and aims to address the requirements for digital repository curation service environments. The workshop will focus on highlighting application environments where both e-Science and repositories have much to gain, coupled with the benefits of open standards. DRs will be discussed in the workshop as trusted repositories for publications as well as primary data, shifting from a bespoke software tool towards a generic framework accommodating various contexts and requirements.

Matthias Razum (FIZ Karlsruhe): "eSciDoc - Building an e-Research platform for multi-disciplinary research organizations"

eSciDoc is a German joint project of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe, aimed at building an e-Science platform for multi-disciplinary research organizations, which builds upon the Fedora repository technology in order to provide effective and comprehensive access to data and information and support collaboration and interdisciplinary research in future e-Science scenarios. It is currently being rolled out at the Max Planck society using a combination of Fedora and additional middleware services together with application specific solutions. While FIZ Karlsruhe is responsible for developing the middleware, Max Planck Digital Library in Munich will develop solutions to server particular user communities. It offers Flexible content models with compound objects and arbitrary metadata profiles for object where each object can be associated with many metadata standards. eSciDoc is an infrastructure solution. Domain-specific application logic can be built on top

Adil Hasan (Liverpool): "SHAMAN Project: Tools and Technologies"

The SHAMAN (Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg) project is a large-scale integration project in the 7th Research and Development Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union. It aims at developing the next generation digital preservation (DP) framework. It will deliver preservation tools for analysing, ingesting, managing, accessing and reusing digital objects and data across libraries and archives. SHAMAN will engineer a preservation approach that will guarantee that future systems and technologies, running on unknown infrastructures, will be able to communicate with legacy data and services.

The Multivalent preservation architecture within SHAMAN preserves the ability to manipulate the original encoding format of a digital entity. It remains unchanged, while making it possible to apply new operations. iRODS is used to store the data. The iRODS data grid automates the execution of management policies, minimizing the amount of labor needed to organize and preserve large collections.

Final Dicussions

The discussion started with the extension of DReSNet. Possible directions were discussed, and it was decided to aim at the first instance at subject domains in research rather than forming yet another repository network. DReSNet should focus on particular groups and disciplines like biological sciences and astrophysics, but with a window on more generic data sharing roles. Some working groups were suggested but it was felt that these should be started later in 2009 after another DReSNet workshop. It was decided to focus on application/community specific workshops instead for 2009.

DReSNet should be a forum for research on how repositories can move beyond being mainly applications to store documents and sometimes research data. Repositories are still very much ‘library applications’. In order to achieve a better understanding of how they can serve active research, we need to look at questions like:

• How can we support a scientist for the future?
• What is considered a useful repository? Maybe we need to move away from the term repository. Repositories are not just pieces of software. Half their functionality comes from their policies.
• Where are existing research data repositories? We need to build a registry of data repositories.
• What are best practices in building research data archives?
• Attendees were generally enthusiastic about possible outcomes of DReSNet for bringing together the two scholarly communications communities of repositories and e-Science.